A top secret NFL report does not fail to indicate a suspicion that Michael Vick was probably placed on Double Secret Suspension with Pay and full Conjugal Visits from both his partner and Roger Goodell himself following Michael Vick’s recent expression of his ability to live up to the high standards set, reset, and reset again by the NFL and The Eagles. 

This sentence should have been read with dripping sarcasm, irony, outrage, disbelief and confusion or basically all the same emotions that any statement made by Michael Vick, Roger Goodell, the NFL, or the Eagles would receive since their words rarely represent reality and are all equally unbelievable and insulting.  If you failed to read the first sentence with tongue in cheek its your own fault as the burden of reality is placed on you the reader not by your own experiences in real life but by the flippant disregard and care the NFL has come to express in its dealings with its customers otherwise referred to as ‘the fans’.  You should have been conditioned by the NFL by now, if not, then you aren’t a real NFL fan.  :p

LOL

Its STILL completely outrageous how completely ignorant and insulting the NFL, Roger Goodell and the Eagles can be when dealing with ‘the fans’, but I had to laugh when I read Phil Sheridan’s most recent column on the farce that is the NFL review of Michael Vick as a player in that organization.

A couple of hours after the news conference, Goodell met with Vick and then issued a statement that said, in part, that Vick will be required "to meet even higher standards." It was impossible not to think of Dean Wormer placing the Delta crew on "double secret probation" in Animal House.

 

Its sad that life is imitating art here and frankly it wouldn’t surprise me a bit at this point to learn that Michael Vick had killed a horse and hidden it in Goodell’s office or that they were taking turns spanking each other in the locker room, just to see if they could angle in a little more depravity into their contempt for ‘the fans’.  That said, I think its safe (so far) to say that Roger Goodell might remove the secrecy of the double secret suspension from Michael Vick if Michael Vick were caught running a horse fighting ring.  Goodell may be as flexible as Gumby but even he has to draw the line somewhere(otherwise he’d never get a chance to use his eraser).

Dog Fighting and Racial Disparity Aside

As an aside, its important to understand that Roger Goodell, Michael Vick, The Eagles and the NFL are not the only ones that suffer from tortured logic and statements that make no sense.  Take this ridiculously ignorant article by Kathy Rudy of Duke University. (It is dated shortly after Michael Vick plead guilty in 2007, so maybe Rudy has developed or perfected her own perspective, I point it out here as an example that is very similar to Goodell’s recent non-actions and non-statements)

Rudy basically builds her argument as follows(my attempt to paraphrase):

1. She is against animal cruelty of all types
2. She has worked to rescue dogs
3. She thinks dog fighting is bad
4. Like dog fighting she argues that rodeos, horse racing and dog racing are also bad [ up to this point I don’t have a fundamental disagreement with her personally ]
5. [tortured logic starts here] Dog fighting has moved out of the realm(made illegal decades ago along with cock fighting) of the white, rich, or middle classes and races and have been left stuck with the poor, African or Latino classes and races. 
6. Dog fighting has the same impact on dogs as rodeos have on bulls and horses, horse races have on horses, and dog races have on dogs
7. Dog races, rodeos, and horse races are still legal
8. Dog races, rodeos, and horse races are still attractive to whites, the rich, and or middle class folks
9. Since they are on par with each other, Michael Vick is getting picked on because of his race (even though he was and is still rich)

Excerpt of the most tortured part of that article

We need to face the fact that dog fighting is not the only "sport" that abuses animals. Cruelty also occurs in rodeos, horse and dog racing (all of which mistreat animals and often kill them when no longer useful). There are also millions of dogs and cats we put to death in "shelters" across the country because they lack a home, and billions of creatures we torture in factory farms for our food.

Vick treated his dogs very cruelly; there is no question about that. But I see one important difference between these more socially acceptable mistreatments and the anger focused on Vick: Vick is black, and most of the folks in charge of the other activities are white.

Some might argue that the difference between dog fighting and these other forms of animal abuse is that dog fighting is illegal. That’s true, but the fact that dog fighting is illegal while other institutions remain acceptable is because dog fighting no longer a sport of the middle and upper class. Dog fighting (and cock fighting) used to be "sports" enjoyed by the upper classes in the U.S. and were, then, perfectly legal. In the last 50 years, however, they have become the domain mostly of blacks, Latinos and poor whites — and were ruled illegal. Now, while white middle and upper classes continue to watch horses run to the point of exhaustion and risk breaking their legs, they regard dog fighting as something that only low-class "thugs and drug dealers" find entertaining. Indeed, a reading of many of the Vick news stories indicts him and his friends as much for being involved in hip-hop subculture as for fighting dogs.  Kathy Rudy Michael Vick, Dog Fighting and Race

The problem with this poorly built position is that it

1. Makes it acceptable to engage in dog fighting by default because its not a moral law because the law has a higher impact on the poor classes, Latinos, and African Americans
2. Such a law could not become moral until all sports that feature some level of cruelty for animals (I guess she is ignoring football players, boxers and wrestlers as they presumably have free will?) are ALSO made illegal
3. Once we have a utopian set of laws enacted and enforced at some single magical starting point in time, then and only then, will the laws be morally legal as they will have the same equal impact on all peoples regardless of race or social class.

OK, so lets take a deep breath and call BULLSHIT or maybe VEGANSHIT.

Its just a stupid argument and Rudy probably regretted it about as fast and as much as Goodell regretted letting Vick back in the NFL and the Eagles regretted hiring him.

The reality is this.

Laws are created, written, enacted and enforced as a progression.  They build upon on a foundation and work to ‘perfect’ the law.  Before dog fighting became illegal, the law was still sound, but after it was made illegal the law was better, society made a collective decision to make the country a better place by putting controls in place to deter people from fighting animals against each other.  Bull fighting in the US went through a similar process (Its even starting to fall into disfavor in Spain!).

Horse racing, dog racing, and rodeos are on the decline in popularity culturally speaking.  Part of this is due to societies raised awareness of the harm on the animals that are used in the sport, part of it comes from a change in cultural interests.  It would not surprise me a bit to see this change continue and laws could be set making these activities illegal.

110 years ago my own step great-grandfather ran a cock fighting ring, when and where it was legal.  The family stopped it long before it was made illegal.  80 years ago my great grandfather (different side of the family) was a jockey.  The family no longer has any members that work as a jockey and to my knowledge no one in the family has even been to a horse race in over 40 years.  Its just an example, but the point is we move on, we change, and many of us do this before we are forced to by law.

  The problem here is not that dog fighting is an activity ‘popular’ in certain communities and not in others.

The problem is the tortured logic of comparing an illegal activity to a legal activity and dismissing crimes committed because more activities are not yet illegal.

I gladly get up on the soap box and call for a fix to the imperfect laws in sentencing when it comes to the use of Crack vs Cocaine.  That’s a REAL example of a racial disparity in the law and in its execution. 

When some fool gets up on a soap box and tries to build an argument with a FAUX example, it confuses the issue and serves to make real progress more difficult.

It makes it harder to make advances in perfecting the law that might protect horses, or bulls, or steers, or racing dogs.  It makes it harder to make real progress for people sentenced under the current drug laws.

So when the ‘experts’ in animal advocacy can’t even form a coherent argument such as Rudy above or HSUS as a couple examples, we can’t really be surprised when people on the other side of the argument, not the side that is for dog fighting, but the side that resides on the third axis of the equation, the referees (lawmakers, politicians, NFL commissioners, team owners, fans etc).  When the experts can’t even get it together, its not terribly surprising that he people in the middle and off on a third axis sound like confused fools that are pandering to anyone that will buy a ticket or a jersey.