Boston Bruin Skips White House Photo Op Citing Government Intrusion

Members of the Stanley Cup Champion Boston Bruins visited the White House Monday, absent their star goalie, Tim Thomas

My new hero is Tim Thomas, star goalie for the Stanley Cup Champion Boston Bruins. I’m not a Bruin fan, nor a hockey fan. But I’m a fan of any citizen who tells an over-reaching government, “Enough is enough.” On Monday, when the rest of the Bruins visited the White House and posed for photos with the hardest smiling President ever, presenting him with a jersey with his name on it, Tim Thomas stayed away. His explanation was posted on his Facebook page:

“I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People.

This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government.

Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.

This is the only public statement I will be making on this topic. TT”

The inevitable character assassination from the Leftist media of any American who dares snub The One has ensued, with The Boston Globe playing Palace Guard for Obama, attempting a caricature of Thomas as self-absorbed. (Imagine a defender of Obama seeing that quality in everyone except….?) That only makes me like Thomas more, because he had to know the Lefties would have their knives sharpened for him. And frankly, this ritual of championship teams touring the White House has become tiresome, irritating and phony as hell. I get the sentiment, the Americana of it, and that’s great. But the juxtaposition of sports champions, (who have struggled in a hyper-competitive industry to defeat all competitors and emerge bloodied but victorious), grinning alongside a Socialist chief executive who thinks the American value of “fairness” requires taking from productive citizens and giving to those who do nothing, is too Orwellian to bear. Sports are supposed to unite the nation. Yes, we are partisans rooting for our own teams, but after the dust has settled, we graciously congratulate the loyal opposition, and bid them, “Wait until next year!” Sports champions posing with the most divisive President in U.S. history, whose view of the 99% against the 1% would incite blue collar fans to hang millionaire athletes from goalposts, is too contradictory to wrap my head around.

In many ways, professional sports are our last refuge from the stultifying political correctness that has robbed so much joy from life. In professional sports, they still keep score. Teams are still able to defeat the opposition. Athletes compete for their teams and for their own personal advancement, breaking records and reaping rewards for establishing that they are better than the others attempting to do the same thing. So what in the world are they doing, gripping and grinning with Mr. Spread-the-Wealth-Around?

Last weekend in the NFL Conference Championships we saw a tale of two kickers: New York placekicker Lawrence Tynes split the uprights in overtime to send the Giants to the Superbowl, while the usually reliable Raven’s kicker Billy Cundiff missed a chip shot that doomed his team. The contrast between Cundiff and Tynes, the emotional highs and lows, are what sports are for America. We’re a country of risk-takers, descended from adventurous pilgrims who risked death for freedom in centuries past. Sports keeps that part of us alive in our mostly safe and protected environment. It’s totally anomalous for men of the arena, whether it’s football, hockey, baseball or basketball, to pose alongside President Throws-like-a-Girl, who represents the polar opposite. More than any public figure in U.S. history, President Obama represents what happens when a bright child is shielded from honest competition, enabled and elevated beyond his capacity. This is, after all, the man who became President of the Harvard Law Review without ever publishing an article. Who won a Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of what he might one day do. Has there ever been a greater recipient of the insidious war against achievement? When political correctness and self-esteem rule the day, what results is shallow, characterless, narcissistic petulance. That is sad enough to witness in a man on the street, it is tragic in the representative of a great nation.

If Barack Obama’s view of “fairness” were enacted in the sports world, the Super Bowl would be the “no better than any other bowl.” Every high and low would be leveled. After all, it’s just a game, why should someone like Billy Cundiff have to suffer all off-season? He’s a good guy. He deserves a break. Give him a do-over; it doesn’t hurt anyone. Does it? Oh, and if a team lost its quarterback, (like the division-leading Chicago Bears lost Jay Cutler, initiating an oh-so-unfair death spiral), the other team would have to bench its starting quarterback. After all, what’s fair is fair, right?

Tuesday night, Barack Obama gave his State of the Union address, outlining all the things he could do as President if he ever put his mind to it. It was loaded with the usual Marxist platitudes about shared responsibility, (that’s code for more wasteful spending that consolidates corrupt government power but does nothing to alleviate poverty), convoluted facts and misinformation, all delivered with his signature pomposity. Listening to His Emptiness prattle, my mind strayed to a quotation by Theodore Roosevelt, from his 1910 speech at the Sorbonne in Paris:

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

I truly understand how Tim Thomas could arrive at his decision to skip the White House dog-and-pony show. A champion of the arena has better things to do with his time.

Tags: Barack Obama, Boston Bruins, State of the Union address, Tim Thomas, white house

This entry was posted on January 26, 2012 at 6:11 am and is filed under Kevin Rush, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.