Denmark Vesey: Will Media Do To Roger Clemens What They Did To Barry Bonds?

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Will Media Do To Roger Clemens What They Did To Barry Bonds?

After Sunday's ''60 Minutes'' appearance that did little to convince anyone of his innocence, Clemens held a damage-control news conference Monday in Houston that was carried on ESPN. At the onset, Rusty Hardin, Clemens' lawyer, asked everyone to keep an open mind about his client, who insists he has never used performance-enhancing drugs. Hardin proceeded to play a tape of a 17-minute-long telephone conversation between Clemens and Brian McNamee, the trainer who told the Mitchell Commission that Clemens used steroids and HGH. Hardin obviously thought the tape would help Clemens' cause. To my ears, however, it did more harm than good. - BY CAROL SLEZAK

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: So far, Clemens is getting about 5% of what Bonds got. I "hate" (in the sports sense) Clemens. Let's stay tuned.; Jan 9, 2008, 12:11:00 PM
? said...: What about Marion Jones? There is a real miscarriage of justice. Jason Giambi admits to juicin and he skates, Jones admits to it and has her medals stripped, her career destroyed and she goes to jail. While Mark, Barry, and Clemens are still walkin around Marion's life is ruined and she is seperated from her kids, sad.; Jan 11, 2008, 2:17:00 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

The founders of the American state understood that the proper functioning of a democracy required an educated electorate. It is this understanding that justifies a system of public education and that led slaveholders to resist the spread of literacy among their chattels. But the meaning of "educated" has changed beyond recognition in two hundred years. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to decide on public policy. Now we need quantum mechanics and molecular biology. The knowledge required for political rationality, once available to the masses, is now in the possession of a specially educated elite, a situation that creates a series of tensions and contradictions in the operation of representative democracy.

Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. P

Lord Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science On Society (Routledge Press: New York, 1951).

"At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars.. War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full. The state of affairs might be unpleasant, but what of it?"