Playing By The Rules
by digby
Amid all the partisan rancor of congressional politics, the softball league has for 37 years been a rare case of bipartisan civility, an opportunity for Democratic and Republican aides to sneak out of work a bit early and take the field in the name of the lawmaker, committee or federal agency they work for.
This year, the league will be missing something: a lot of the Republicans.
During the off-season, a group of Republican teams seceded from the league after accusing its Democratic commissioner, Gary Caruso, of running a socialist year-end playoff system that gives below-average teams an unfair chance to win the championship.
The league “is all about Softball Welfare — aiding the weak by punishing the strong,” the pitcher of one Republican team told Mr. Caruso in an email. “The commissioner has a long-standing policy of punishing success and rewarding failure. He’s a Democrat. Waddya’ expect?” read another email, from Gary Mahmoud, the coach of BoehnerLand, a team from the office of Republican Majority Leader John Boehner.
Is every Republican in Washington the emotional age of seven? The rules require that some of the lesser teams get a chance to participate in the “playoffs” so the manly he-men who have shed their blood and sweat throughout the grueling season are angry that it denies them their rightful place atop congressional softball Olympus. After all, they deserve the glory:
The congressional league is a relaxed affair: No umpires call balls and strikes, so batters don’t have to swing until they get a pitch they like. Fields are open to the public, so most teams dispatch an intern or junior aide to reserve a field several hours before game time.
Can someone tell me why these awesome GOP athletes aren’t in Iraq instead of measuring their dicks in a slow-pitch softball league that a junior high girls team could easily dominate? Could it be because they are a bunch of pathetic, bedwetting chickenshits? I thought so.
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