Forget the record number of mortgage foreclosures threatening to derail the world's largest economy. Don't worry that the Congress of the United States can't get its act together even to pass necessary spending bills. Who cares that we have a presidential nomination process that may determine the future of the Free World? Why concern yourself that the government is listening in to your phone calls and e-mails without oversight, torturing people and destroying evidence of such misdeeds, and denying even the most basic of procedural rights to those people it doesn't like?
Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens supposedly used steroids or human growth hormones to temporarily improve their on-field performances. Now that's headline news; yes, siree, Bob.
The priorities of the American people sometimes mystify me greatly. Granted, my priorities sometimes mystify people, including my wife, perhaps even greatly. But come on now, I would really like someone to explain to me with a straight face why — with all the serious problems facing us at home and abroad — a bunch of overpaid and underworked jocks taking drugs that provide short-term gain and long-term pain should concern me more than all these other crises. Even more to the point, why should such a matter be of any concern whatsoever to the Congress of the United States and to our president?
I know that anabolic steroids are — have been since the 1990s — among the dozens of drugs deemed too dangerous to allow citizens to use without government permission; the mere possession of which may subject a person to years in federal prison. However, unlike many of the drugs occupying space on the federal Controlled Substances Act, anabolic steroids pose no real danger to anyone other than the users. If the users do harm others, they can be prosecuted for their misdeeds, as is frequently done for DUIs.
These drugs bulk up one's muscles and shrink certain other parts of the male anatomy. And their potential long-term effects are not among those I would knowingly subject my body to. But, hey, if an athlete is willing to mortgage his long-term health and perhaps shorten his life span, in return for a few more home runs or strikeouts, and if the team employing him is willing to pay a ridiculous sum of money to have him do so, more power to him.
Yet we now have a former U.S. senator — Maine's George Mitchell — at least two federal law enforcement agencies (the FBI and the IRS), at least one U.S. Attorney's office, and members of Congress from both major political parties, all tripping over themselves to prove they are tougher than the next person at removing this scourge from the face of sports in America. Surely, friends, there has to be something more important for Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Tom Davis (R-Va.) — the two leaders of the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee — to do than to hold more headline-grabbing hearings as they did just two years ago, highlighting how devoid of real sportsmanship major league baseball is. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel.
Even federal law enforcement agencies can't seem to resist the urge to dip their investigative toes into the shallow water of major league sports scandals. Pressuring the weak-willed hangers-on who frequent sports training rooms to snitch on sports celebrities, many of whom have incomes that far exceed their maturity level, as a way to save themselves a few years in the slammer is not exactly the stuff of Eliot Ness; but it will inflate the yearly plea bargaining statistics.
While one can certainly understand the angst a Clemens, an Andy Pettitte or a David Justice might feel in being linked however tenuously to the use of steroids or human growth hormones, our pity for them ought be tempered by the fact that this entire "investigation" is essentially a carnival show based on innuendo, hearsay-on-hearsay, and self-serving statements.
When all the dust settles, probably only a few of the celebrity figures named in the Mitchell Report will suffer any lasting economic or professional harm as a result of this maelstrom (Bonds, who faces a questionable federal prosecution for not "coming clean" when the government tried to pressure him into doing so, being the exception). However, the damage to our judicial and legislative systems, which have been trivialized and manipulated by these proceedings, will be much more serious.
• Former congressman and U.S. Attorney Bob Barr practices law in Atlanta
