If anyone needs performance enhancing drugs, it is the Republican members of the U.S. Congress. In an exhibition befitting Little Leaguers, the House Oversight & Govt. Reform Committee managed to turn a hearing on illegal use of steroids by baseball players into theater of the absurd.
Steroid use is a serious issue at least partly because of its effects on those young athletes – high school age and younger – trying to gain an edge by using drugs that ultimately can seriously damage their health. By focusing on one player’s presumed guilt the Committee managed to create an opportunity for Republicans to rush to the protection of Clemens, a Bush family friend, and turn a potentially serious discussion into one more GOP generated partisan flackshow.
As for the Hearings – Mike Wise in the Washington Post cut quickly to the chase:
“As the contradictions kept coming yesterday in the Rayburn House Office Building, Clemens came across as a megalomaniac, a habitual liar and a barrel-chested fraud. The people who believe him now seem to be either paid by Clemens, married to him or in worse denial than the Rocket himself.
He came to Capitol Hill not to swear, under oath, his innocence of being a drug cheat; Clemens came here to show America that the arrogance of the elite athlete has moved beyond our ball fields, universities and clubhouses straight into a witness chair at a congressional hearing.â€
Those Republican Committee members that attempted to portray Clemens as a hero rather than an egotistical liar were on something but it was decidedly not performance enhancing. They accepted Clemens’ nonsensical testimony without blinking an eye and proved once again that most of a generation of Republican politicians have become T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men.
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar”