Super Bowl Fails

by G. Murphy Donovan

“The lady doth protest, too much, methinks.” – WS

Surely the Super Bowl game itself wasn’t a fail; if you like defense and fourth quarter suspense.     

What’s not to like about the New England Patriots, America’s team it seems. Tom Brady and Jules Edelman, just as twelve follows eleven, littered the playing field with Los Angeles jockstraps. The Rams only put three points on the board. The Edelman performance alone kept the LA offense off the field. The city of angels had no answer to the 2019 Belichick defense and the now hirsute Edelman.

The “goat” and “squirrel” up in Foxboro might be the best offensive duet in football.

Tip of the hat too, to the New Orleans Saints who should have been in Atlanta instead of the Los Angeles Hams. Sometimes, poetic justice is the only justice available. Or maybe some of those playoff zebras actually work for team Las Vegas.

Surely Gladys Knight wasn’t a fail. Her rendition of the national anthem was poetic, the highlight of the secular entertainment. No-anti cop twerks or screeds from Gladys and nobody took a knee. Bravo! At least one super talent overcame politics in 2019.

The half-time show, in contrast, featured a slacker, a cracker, and a rapper. When you got past the “who are these guys” mystery, you are left with Adam Levine looking like the “D” Train rattling through the south Bronx. If you’re that insecure, Adam, you might want to keep your clothes on.

 

The only thing that tramp stamps and skin graffiti ever say is “look at me.” Body “art” and IQ numbers are usually inversely proportionate too as a rule; personal tats and stats that you might not want to feature on national television.

The big fail on Super Bowl Sunday, however, was literally commercial – and pathetically political. Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post bought Tom Hanks, and a five million dollar ad spot, to tell the sporting world about the virtues of Bezos era journalism.

Alas, virtue signaling usually says more about predicate than object. And Jeff’s new domicile inside the Beltway swamp says as much about his politics as you need to know.

Democracy doesn’t “die in darkness,” Jeff. Democracy, like marriage, dies from neglect and insincerity.

In 2019, home town Bezos, has 16 unsolved homicides already, all black, on the books. There were 4,141 violent crimes in Washington, DC last year, 160 of those were homicides too, up 38 percent over 2016. DC homicide is trending up again in the New Year. Yet, the Washington Post buys a 5 million dollar advert on Super Bowl Sunday to lament the loss of a single Arab stringer in Turkey.

Good grief!

The Sunni world has been loping off heads since Mohamed was an altar boy. Are we to wax indignant about mindless kills only when the victim is a sometime employee of the Post?

If perspective were toilets, the Bezos Post could be a sewage treatment plant. The question that the public should ask about Bezos and the Washington Post is the same that should be asked of any public figure.

If your wife can’t trust you after 25 years of marriage, why should readers?

Bezos was recently hoisted on the philander petard by a colleague, the editor of the National Enquirer. Jeffry now claims that any graphic coverage of his marital sleaze is “blackmail” or “extortion.”

Trump is fair game, but Bezos is not?

Are we now supposed to believe that the world’s richest political partisan on the American left is just another victim?

Bezos underlines the deficits, not the assets of contemporary fish wrap when he or the Post buys a Hollywood doxy like Tom Hanks as a propaganda shill. Hanks is a contagious Hollywood liberal who apparently, like his colleagues, will say anything if the price is right.

The Bezos commercial is an egregious example of sanctimonious thought policing; a practice designed to obliterate boundaries between reporters, entertainers, politicians, and Madison Avenue shills.

If American journalism, especially the Washington Post, was about fact, objectivity, or truth; it would be obvious in practice. There would be no need for paid propaganda. Lady Gertrude had it right the first time; insincerity is not elevated by repetition – not even when it swirls clockwise in the middle of the nation’s capital – or a Super Bowl.

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The author writes often about the politics of national security.