Governor Corbett Manages to Lower the Sleaze Bar

Governor (and Space Cadet) tom Corbett takes on the NCAA's attempt to flush PSU's football ambitions. 

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. Just when you’ve convinced yourself that you’ve seen all the sleaze imaginable, another slime ball climbs out from under a rock. I mean, how can you top the Nazi Rifle Association’s response to the Newtown massacre? Congratulations to Tom Corbett, who managed.

If you’ve not yet heard, Corbett is the Republican (natch!) governor of Pennsylvania who recently announced his intention to spend some taxpayer money to sue the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). That’s because of the NCAA’s pathetic standards for scholar athletes, right? No–guess again. Is it because the NCAA has refused to curtail exploitative recruiting practices that allow colleges to bring academically ill-prepared inner-city black kids onto campus just long enough to get a fall’s worth of football out of them before they flunk out? Wrong again. Nope–old Governor Corbett is livid that the NCAA banned saintly Penn State from playing any bowl games for–my God!–four years. Such a harsh sentence for such a trivial matter!

I’m talking, of course, about the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal that took down Joe Paterno and PSU’s president. I mean, all that happened was the at least 8 minor children were raped during a 16-year period while Paterno turned a blind eye and the Athletic Department covered it up. Hell, that’s just one little boy every two years–hardly enough to warrant keeping the university’s football team out bowl games!!! What was the NCAA thinking? I mean this is Penn State after all–a football powerhouse. What’s a young boy every now and then when gridiron supremacy is on the line?

Corbett sure put the “pig” back into pigskin. As it happens, I’m also furious with the NCAA. I’m livid because it didn’t lower the death penalty to PSU football. Sixteen years of pedophilia and all PSU got was a four-year bowl ban and the loss of a few athletic scholarships? That’s it? If the PSU faculty has a collective scrap of decency, its response to Corbett’s pathetic lawsuit will be a vote to dismantle the football program. Don’t give me any of that crap about how the young men on the team today had nothing to do with Sandusky. My response is that inconveniencing those who would have to transfer would teach them a greater lesson than they’d ever learn at State College. That is, if we still believe that protecting children is more important than football.

Pennsylvania taxpayers should be up in arms over this. First of all, no one has ever successfully taken on the NCAA, so Corbett is a fool on a fool’s errand. Second, I’ve driven Pennsylvania roads recently and can think of at least one better use for state monies. Third, the federal government has got to be watching all of this. Corbett has already said that he intends to have the Commonwealth opt out of the healthcare exchange network under President Obama’s medical reform act. Is a federal lawsuit in the offing? It should be. If Corbett has money to burn on making the state safe for football coaches who play footsies with children, he’s got the cash for healthcare reform! 

I can’t recall who wrote the first article I read with the title “Does America Hate Children?” I know it was in the 1980s and I think it was in Newsweek, but I might be mistaken. No matter–dozens of such articles have appeared since. No doubt Pigskin Corbett’s gross insensitivity will spark a few more. At the very least it’s another confirmation of a frequently slung aphorism about the GOP–it’s a party that believes that life begins at conception and ends at birth. Unless, of course, the child is a boy that looks like he might grow up to be a halfback.