Vick has disease for which there is no cure

QB will probably get 2nd NFL chance in NFL, but he will always be an idiot

By Spencer Hall

The Sporting News

updated 5:11 p.m. ET, Wed., May 20, 2009

Mike Vick is semi-free, dumb, and still probably physically gifted enough to play professional football in the NFL.

Still stupid, he leaves Leavenworth today, having thrown away millions on worthless childhood friends and a peculiar blindness to the implicit evil of watching animals kill each other for sport.

He will take various forms of transport to his big, stupid house in Hampton, Virginia, and then work a $10-per-hour job as a construction worker in his own dumb, not-so-bright way until he leaves Federal custody on July 20.

At that point, the Atlanta Falcons will say, "Roger Goodell, please reinstate the idiot we foolishly threw millions upon millions of dollars at, so we can take his stupid self and release him, thus allowing some other team to take a chance on making this complete and total idiot an NFL quarterback."

Roger Goodell will probably then agree, signing a few papers and publicly announcing that the moron known as Mike Vick can play football, if only because he's done his time and because perhaps the moron can do some good as an NFL QB.

Then the obtuse twit known as Mike Vick can attempt to rejoin a franchise. It would help if the franchise was an especially stupid one, since the real essence of the Mike Vick party comes to someone with absolutely zero intelligence attempting to deal with being astonishingly wealthy.

Wax romantic about the possible convoluted complexities of his psyche, of the excuses of his hard upbringing, of the intricacies of dogfighting culture. Ultimately this comes down to the condition of being a very talented idiot, a fortunate condition Vick has squandered magnificently.

What's making me squeamish isn't dubbing his a life lived in the key of dumbass, since there is abundant evidence to point out that Mike Vick isn't that bright, and hasn't been for a while. (Just read the bankruptcy settlement and its listing of unaccounted for millions for evidence of this.)

My squeamishness comes in the hope that he'll somehow become something in the public eye other than what he is: a brilliant idiot currently caught in the downcycle of fate's wheel. He could be just as dazzling on the field of play again as a player, and even then the mind will want to project greater, grander things on him as an athlete, the oldest kind of lie for a sports fan: that Mike Vick's on-field bursts of genius have something to do with anything else he does as a person.

Laugh now, but the redemption script awaits, and all he needs to do is read along with the help of agents, handlers, and ESPN. Everyone else knows their parts down pat, and will happily play along. He may even mean it, though you'll never know.

The point is not to dismiss this possibility, but to remember that the actor in question suffers from an incurable condition for which there is no cure: stupidity. It may flare up at any point without warning, and its side effects are endless. Take your chances with him at your own risk.

© 2009 The Sporting News

Commentary: Prosecute sins of Bush-Cheney era

Story Highlights

Jack Cafferty: Bush administration left behind a trail of misdeeds

Cafferty: Obama is wrong to say he only wants to look forward, not back

Cafferty: Damage will last until Bush-Cheney deeds are addressed

Cafferty: A special prosecutor should be named to investigate

By Jack Cafferty
CNN

Editor's note: Jack Cafferty is the author of a new book, "Now or Never: Getting Down to the Business of Saving Our American Dream." He provides commentary on CNN's "The Situation Room" daily from 4 to 7 p.m. ET. You can also visit Jack's Cafferty File blog.

(CNN) -- It doesn't go away by itself.

Watergate "went away" when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace and left town never to be heard from in an official capacity again.

The Bush presidency is thankfully over...but the damage he and Dick Cheney did continues to press on the nerve of the American people like an impacted wisdom tooth. And until the questions surrounding arguably the most arrogant and perhaps most corrupt administration in our history are addressed, the pain won't go away.

From Nancy ("Impeachment is off the table") Pelosi to President Barack ("I want to look forward, not backward") Obama, the country is being poorly served by their Democratic government. And on this subject President Obama is dead wrong.

George W. Bush and his accomplices damaged this country like it's never been damaged before. And it's not just the phony war in Iraq or the torture memos that justified waterboarding. It's millions of missing emails and the constant use of executive privilege and signing statements.

It's the secretive meetings with Enron and other energy executives and the wholesale firing of federal prosecutors. It's trying to get the president's personal attorney seated on the Supreme Court and that despicable Alberto Gonzales sitting in front of congressional investigators whining, "I don't remember, I don't know, I...etc."

It's the domestic eavesdropping in violation of the FISA Court, the rendition prisons, and the lying. It's looking the other way while the City of New Orleans drowned and its people were left to fend for themselves.

It's the violations of the Geneva Conventions, the soiling of our international reputation and the shredding of the U.S. Constitution. It's the handing over of $700 billion to the Wall Street fat cats last fall, no questions asked. Where is that money? What was it used for?

It's the no-bid contracts to firms like Halliburton and Blackwater and the shoddy construction and lack of oversight of reconstruction in Iraq that cost American taxpayers untold billions.

If the Republicans were serious about restoring their reputation, they would join the call for a special prosecutor to be appointed so that at long last justice can be done.

It's too late for George W. Bush to resign the presidency. But it's not too late to put the people responsible for this national disgrace in prison.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jack Cafferty.

Commentary: Time for Cheney to go hunting

Story Highlights

Cafferty: Former VP must stop grumbling about why Obama administration is wrong

Cafferty says Obama was elected due to Cheney, Bush, and problems they left

Cafferty: Bush administration doubled national debt, gave $700 billion to Wall Street

Cafferty: Because of Cheney & Co. our reputation is shot, we're bankrupt, at war

By Jack Cafferty
CNN

Editor's note: Jack Cafferty is the author of a new book, "Now or Never: Getting Down to the Business of Saving Our American Dream." He provides commentary on CNN's "The Situation Room" daily from 4 to 7 p.m. ET. You can also visit Jack's Cafferty File blog.

(CNN) -- It's time for the Republican Party to tell former Vice President Dick Cheney to put a sock in it.

Here we are 100 days into the new administration of Barack Obama, and Darth Vader is still wandering around grumbling about why the new administration is all wrong.

Nobody is interested anymore, Mr. Vice President. You and your gaggle of miscreants had your shot, and we are in the toilet because of it. Don't you get it?

The election of this nation's first African-American president and his massacre of John McCain in the Electoral College is because of you and President Bush and the myriad problems you left us all with.

Last week, you were predicting President Obama's economic policies would have devastating effects in the long term. This from a member of an administration that more than doubled the national debt in eight years and gave $700 billion to its buddies on Wall Street, no questions asked. You're a little short on credibility when it comes to the economy, don't you think?

We are reading about enhanced interrogation memos written by lawyers at the Justice Department that authorized the United States of America to behave like some Third World gang of hoodlums like the Taliban or al Qaeda.

Two members of al Qaeda were waterboarded 266 times in a single month in violation of the Geneva Conventions as well as other international agreements we are signatories to. Who authorized those memos to be written, Mr. Vice President?

President Obama has done an about-face and said he now favors an investigation into those memos. Where will that investigation lead, Mr. Vice President? This country used to stand for something before you and President Bush got your hooks into it.

Now our reputation is shot, we are bankrupt, we continue to fight two wars that you started and the economy is in the worst recession since the Great Depression. And you have the temerity to go around criticizing those who replaced you? How dare you?

If the Republican Party has any hopes of redeeming itself in the eyes of the voters, they must distance themselves from the likes of Dick Cheney and the fundamentalist right-wingers who have become the poster children of political intolerance in this country.

Why do you think some members of your party are suggesting you embrace same-sex marriage? Because of a change of heart? I doubt it. More likely, the wiser heads in the party recognize that without some nod toward inclusion of someone besides the extremists you represent, your party's political chances going forward hover between slim and none.

Please, go quail hunting and leave the rest of us alone.

Okay so Cheney doesn't snort coke and then admit to being a gay swinger, BUT........

Commentary: Cheney says U.S. can torture but can't heal

• Story Highlights
  
• Paul Begala: In CNN interview, Cheney worried about Obama and big government
  
  
• Begala says Cheney was key force behind use of torture and surveillance
  
  
• He says Cheney pushed aggressive use of government to fight terrorism
  
  
• Begala: Cheney criticizes government action on health care, economic recovery
  

Editor's note: Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and CNN political contributor, was a political consultant for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992 and was counselor to Clinton in the White House.
(CNN) -- Dick Cheney has finally found the limits of government power.
In his interview with CNN's John King -- his first television interview since leaving the vice presidency -- Cheney revealed a view of federal power that is incoherent and hypocritical.
According to recently released legal memos from the Bush-Cheney administration, the former vice president believes that the federal government can ignore the First Amendment and suppress free speech and freedom of the press as part of its "war on terror."
An October 23, 2001, memo from Justice Department lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty said, "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully."
Former Vice PresidentCheney also believes, according to these same memos, that the federal government can send troops to burst into the homes of American citizens without a search warrant, despite the Fourth Amendment's protection against such unreasonable searches. He believes that the federal government has the right to arrest an American citizen on American soil and hold him in prison without charges. He believes that the federal government can listen in on your phone conversations without a court order.
Cheney believes that the federal government can ignore the Geneva Conventions, binding treaties largely written by the United States, signed by the president and ratified by the Senate. He believes that the federal government can commit torture, despite laws and treaties making torture a crime.
As the Washington Post reported, "Starting in January, 2002, Cheney turned his attention to the practical business of crushing a captive's will to resist. The vice president's office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion of prisoners in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration has since portrayed as the initiatives, months later, of lower-ranking officials."
The newspaper said, "Cheney and his allies ... did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government."
In fact, Yoo has said the federal government has the power to grab your young son and crush his private parts if the president thinks that will help the "war on terror."
Think I'm kidding? Here's the verbatim exchange from a debate between Yoo and Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel:
Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty ...
Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo ...
Yoo: I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.
Wow. That is a sick, twisted, sadistic world view. It is also a breathtakingly expansive view of federal power over citizens. Indeed, the position of Cheney and his allies seems to be that the federal government has limitless power over people. If the government can censor the free press, restrict free speech, listen in on your private conversations, burst into your home, take you away, hold you in prison without charges and torture you, it raises an interesting question: What on Earth does Dick Cheney think the federal government can't do?
Thanks to John King, we now know: Cheney believes that the government cannot help with health care, improve education or wean America off Middle East oil. I'm not kidding.
Cheney, whose authoritarian impulses run deep, is suddenly worried that the federal government might become too powerful under President Obama.
"I worry a lot," he told King, "that they're using the current set of economic difficulties to try to justify a massive expansion in the government, and much more authority for the government over the private sector. I don't think that's good. I don't think that's going to solve the problem."
Set aside the, umm, irony of a guy who is alive, thank God, because of government-provided health care opposing health care for taxpaying Americans. And set aside the hypocrisy of the Bush-Cheney Medicare prescription drug entitlement, the greatest expansion of the federal role in health care since President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Focus instead on Cheney's alarmist rhetoric: "a massive expansion in the government", "much more authority for the government." Cheney is comfortable with a government that has the authority to torture, imprison, censor and kill. Just not a government that has the capacity and compassion to write a health insurance policy or take on Big Oil.
I write this only hours after King's interview with Cheney, and yet I believe it will live in history. Right there, in his own words, Cheney gives historians a candid explication of his world view: that government may claim dictatorial powers when he and his ilk are in charge, but when we the people call on our government to act to address recession, illness and ignorance (made worse by Cheney's policies) well, then we've reached Cheney's boundaries of the government's power.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul Begala.

Commentary: GOP becoming a cartoon

• Story Highlights
  
• Jack Cafferty: Jindal, Palin, Steele have had embarrassing moments
  
  
• He says the Republicans had an opportunity to change course after Bush
  
  
• Cafferty: They're blowing their chance by obstructing Obama's change plans
  
  
• He says the GOP isn't trusted by Americans to lead U.S. out of recession
  

Editor's note: Jack Cafferty is the author of a new book, "Now or Never: Getting Down to the Business of Saving Our American Dream," to be published in March. He provides commentary on CNN's "The Situation Room" daily from 4 to 7 p.m. ET. You can also visit Jack's Cafferty File blog.
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The Republican Party is becoming a cartoon.
Where to start?
Bobby Jindal: "I'm certainly not nearly as good of a speaker as Obama." Good OF a speaker? How about not as good at eighth-grade grammar either. It's embarrassing.
Sarah Palin? Billing the taxpayers for her kids to travel to official events the children weren't even invited to? She finally agreed to pay back the state for that money she took.
Her per diem charges to the state in the amount of $17,000 while she was living at home instead of in the governor's mansion? She has now agreed to pay the taxes owed on that money. Another tawdry grab at a few dollars that didn't belong to her.
Michael Steele, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, down on his knees apologizing to the helium-filled poster boy of the conservative right? Pathetic.
If the Republicans are ever to emerge from the long dark night they have created for themselves it will have to be without pandering to the right wing nuts that comprise Rush Limbaugh's radio audience. Didn't they learn anything in the last election?
All of which is to say the GOP is blowing it big time. They were handed a golden opportunity to redeem themselves with the election of Barack Obama -- a chance to line up and in unison condemn the evil their party put in the White House the previous eight years.
The country had had a bellyful of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of the messengers of darkness in Washington who had sold out the principles of the Republican Party in favor of huge deficits, a doubling of the national debt, and a growing intrusion of the federal government into people's private lives.
But instead of getting on board the change train and recognizing the incredible amount of damage their people had done to the country, Republicans go blithely along as though nothing has happened. They're busy obstructing Obama's programs and criticizing the Democrats' spending plans that are aimed at trying to bring the country out of a horrible recession.
I hate to break it to them, but a lot has happened. And they're not going to like any of it.
The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows the Republican Party's favorability rating at an all-time low. President Obama's is at an all-time high. The same poll shows that Republicans are getting most of the blame for the partisanship that hinders governmental progress. And perhaps most telling, when asked which party is best equipped to lead the country out of recession, the Republicans trail the Democrats by a stunning 30 points.
And while all this is going on, the GOP ran a straw poll on who the party's nominee should be for president in 2012. Ready?
Mitt Romney finished first followed by Bobby Jindal, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin.
The Republican Party is marching double-time down the road to irrelevance and they don't even know it.

Commentary: Bush still doesn't get it

• Story Highlights
  
• Ed Rollins: Bush ends his second term with a tarnished presidency
  
  
• He says Bush wasn't incompetent or dishonest but he showed arrogance
  
  
• Rollins says the four former presidents who met with Obama all had great failures
  
  
• He says lesson for Obama is that things often don't go as planned
  

Editor's Note: Ed Rollins, who served as political director for President Ronald Reagan, is a Republican strategist who was national chairman of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's 2008 presidential campaign.
NEW YORK (CNN) -- One week from today, a historic presidency begins and a tarnished presidency ends.
The inauguration of Barack Obama, the first African-American president, cannot come quickly enough for the vast majority of Americans.
This young man with the keen disciplined mind and the buffed body begins a presidency with high hopes, goodwill and a never-ending list of problems left on the Oval Office desk by George Walker Bush, the ever-confident occupant of that high office who seems like the dinner guest who will not leave.
In all my years around Washington as an observer and as a member of several administrations, I have rarely witnessed an event as bizarre as President Bush's farewell press conference yesterday.
It reminded me of Richard Nixon's November 17, 1973, question and answer session before 400 Associated Press managing editors at the height of the Watergate scandal, in which he declared: "People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook."
Well, to the best of my knowledge, Nixon wasn't a crook (in the technical sense). He was dishonest, he abused the office of the presidency, and telling the truth wasn't his strong suit. And he resigned in disgrace and would have been impeached if he hadn't. But there were also periods in his presidency that were very good for this country and the world.
President Bush is not a crook either. And even more importantly, I don't believe he is dishonest or an incompetent. The mistakes of his presidency were caused by overconfidence, bad information or a certain arrogance that was still fully on display yesterday.
How can you reflect on going to war, a war of choice, and argue that "not finding weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment," as President Bush did yesterday? And putting the "not finding the weapons" in the same breath as "We shouldn't have hung the sign, 'Mission Accomplished' "!
A disappointment is when you're a football fan and your team lost in the playoffs or in the national championship game. Eliminating weapons of mass destruction was the rationale for sending hundreds of thousands of men and women to Iraq to risk their lives and spending billions of dollars of American taxpayers' money. Find out how some readers are angry over Bush's legacy
The rationale for the war wasn't that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy -- which he was -- and that he violated every sanction and agreement that the United Nations put on him.
President Bush went on to say: "One thing about the presidency is that you can only make decisions based on the information at hand. You don't get to have information after you make the decision -- that's not the way it works."
That is correct and that may be the most important lesson our new president can learn from the failures of the last. Make sure you get the information to make the right decisions.
President Bush, referring to the Abu Ghraib scandal and the missing weapons of mass destruction, said, "I don't know if you want to call those mistakes or not, but things didn't go as planned, let's put it that way."
The lesson for President-elect Obama is often things don't go as planned.
Last week four men who have been president had lunch in the White House with the newly elected president. As I looked at the picture of the five members of the most exclusive club in the world standing in the Oval Office, I felt sad.
Two of the men, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, now in their 80s, had been overwhelmingly defeated in their bids for re-election. President Clinton and President Bush, both in their 60s, had periods of great failure.
President Clinton was impeached. The present president leaves office with the lowest approval ratings in modern history. None of these were bad men -- just the opposite.
Why did their presidencies not live up to those high expectations that we all have for our new leaders on Inauguration Day?
In some cases, they fought their natural allies. President Carter was particularly inept at dealing with Congress; so was the current President Bush. Carter and the two Bushes failed at communicating with the public and were unable to articulate what their programs were and build support for them in Congress. Clinton, a good communicator, was terribly undisciplined.
President Obama will need to set his priorities early. He can't do all he's promised in the first term. He needs to build strong relationships with the Congress and let them play a big role in setting his agenda.
He needs to use his tremendous communication skills and continually explain to the country what he wants to do and why. Then he needs to take his campaign machine and motivate the grassroots organization he built to get Congress to support his programs. He must be patient but persistent in making his case.
As we hope for the change which is coming next week, I just want to pause and reflect and say to President Bush, "Thank you, for serving your country." To our new president: Best of luck and you have our prayers