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Today, at your caucus-themed Super Bowl party, as the 49ers try to hold back the Chiefs, you needn't bother to watch the game itself. Why? We already know who the winner is: the political principles of Senator Bernie Sanders.
That's right. The sport you thought you could rely on as the most 'Merican, capitalist flag-flyin,' Big Gulp guzzlin', red-meat, whitey-tighty, blue-collar battle of uncoddled smashmouth neo-gladiators – and where, might we add, Super Bowl ads cost a pretty $175,000 per second – is, today, an organization committed at its core to the redistribution of wealth. Take from the rich, give to the poor – that's the most socialist of all socialist socialisms, right? Feel the Bern.
Consider: each year, the league seizes money from the richest winningest teams, and redirects it to the poorest losingest teams. So, whoever scores the most points on Sunday will get a bittersweet trip to Disneyland: you may win the game, comrades, but by coming in first you lose millions in league-re-distributed funds. Off you go into the long hard winter of the NFL spring, punished for your success. Call it a wealth tax.
Why does the NFL do this? Out of compassion for teams that fall too far behind. And by compassion, we mean "concern for TV ratings." Lopsided seasons would be bad for viewership, which would be bad for revenue, which would be bad for everyone from the nosebleeds to the skyboxes. Keeping things competitive means tackling inequality on the gridiron.
Not that the NFL has a clean record on competition, of course. Back in '66, the NFL and the AFL merged into a one-state, ahem, one-league, system specifically to keep star players from leveraging contracts between competing leagues. Sure, that was a clear violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, but – quiet, the game's on.
Now, we're not breaking news here. Journalists have pointed out this irony. Comedians too. Even the host of American Idol (not that one, the other one.) Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell decried the NFL as an outfit run by "a bunch of fat-cat Republicans who vote socialist on football." (I'm Bernie Sanders, and I approved this message.)
But before you pigskin pinkos demand every Cheesehead become a dyed-in-the-wool Bernie bro, consider where this comparison falls short. For one thing, wealth redistribution isn't actually socialism. For another, sports leagues are zero sum – you win, I lose – in a way that economies and societies really aren't. And plus, if the NFL were really socialist, it would give workers control over the means of production: if that were the case Patrick Mahomes would be Most Valuable Executive Vice President by now.
The touchdown: This analogy doesn't quite hold up, despite it being a perennial claim. It's like Tom Brady's footballs – seemingly airtight, yet deflates somewhat upon further inspection. But our prediction is you'll hear it again next year.
Our other prediction: Chiefs by 9.
Kevin Bleyer is an Emmy-winning veteran of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Dennis Miller, and the author of Me the People: One Man's Selfless Quest to Rewrite the Constitution of the United States.
Or was that Bangladesh? Hey, it's not us asking, it's Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who recently had a noisy tiff with veteran National Public Radio reporter Marie Louise Kelly. Piqued by her unwelcome questions about Ukraine, Pompeo apparently blew his top, barking, "Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?" To prove his point, he pulled out a world map with no writing on it and demanded Kelly find the country at the heart of his boss' impeachment trial. If Pompeo thought Ukraine was beside the point, Kelly almost certainly knew it was beside Moldova. But in a sulking statement afterwards, Pompeo blasted NPR and closed with "it is worth noting that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine."
Noted. Bangladesh is not Ukraine! And thank heavens we cleared that up before the Secretary headed to Kyiv on Thursday – what a crazy mix-up that avoided. (Phew.)
But none of that answers the question: Do Americans care about Ukraine? Former Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor says they should. Soon enough, John Bolton may weigh in as well, if the former national security advisor becomes an impeachment witness. That'd certainly give us even more reason to think of Ukraine as Our Kraine.
But truth is that most Americans only kinda care about the place at best. For starters, most of us can't find Ukraine on a map — just one in six. And you could reasonably conclude that most Americans wouldn't know about Ukraine at all if the country were not Exhibit A in the prosecution (or defense) of a president we see as guilty (or framed). Not that Ukraine should feel especially snubbed: three-quarters of Americans also couldn't find Iran on a map, and that was just days after the Trump administration killed that country's top general.
So, do our general cartographic shortcomings matter? Again, kinda: for one thing, it seems that the less likely you are to find Ukraine on a map, the more likely you are to support bombing it. And if that holds for all countries, then keeping Pompeo's unmarked maps away from average American voters is a well-demarcated global security issue. (Quick digression: not for nothing, but why exactly does the Secretary of State have unmarked maps at the ready like that?)
To that end, this general map-prehension may hold lessons for the Democratic presidential hopefuls currently storming Iowa (that's next to Ohio, right?) True, foreign policy usually doesn't figure as the most primary of primary issues in US elections, but the candidates still need to grapple with the fact that Donald Trump has pulled the rug out from under 70 years of Washington foreign policy – once a point of American pride that saw the US as an indispensable leader on global issues like trade, security, and finance. They must ask themselves: have we reached the point of no return? Can we go back to the where we were pre-2016, as Joe Biden seems to believe? Or, as other frontrunners Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren seem to grasp in their own ways, perhaps the halcyon days of US leading globalization (while, yes, juggling endless wars) are behind us. What's going to come next? Hard to say just where this path will lead.
It's disorienting. Thankfully, in the words of noted foreign policy expert Judah Friedlander, one truth will always guide us: "America is the greatest country in the United States."
Worth noting.
Kevin Bleyer is an Emmy-winning veteran of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Dennis Miller, and the author of Me the People: One Man's Selfless Quest to Rewrite the Constitution of the United States.