I haven't even bothered to read the weekly TMQ column by Gregggg Easterbrook this football season, because I know what's going to be in it. Still more bullshit and blather condemning the NFL for not acting like an unconstrained, unregulated, private police force and investigating the personal lives of its mostly minority employees. Speaking of Greg Hardy, when did it become cool for a mass of people to rush to judgment against a black man accused of trespassing against a white woman in North Carolina? Didn't that sort of thing go out of fashion, like 50 years ago?

Easterbrook prides himself on his insight and alternative perspective into issues, regularly deriding the conventional wisdom in sports and routinely accusing coaches and other such persons of making safe decisions that accord with the conventional wisdom so as to reduce the risk of getting fired if a less standard tactic backfires. Added to his delight of sprinkling his column with non-football opinions and speculations, the current tempest in the NFL teapot is tailor-made for his self-aggrandizing moralism, that I will not have the stomach to read, considering how often he deploys the tired self-congratulatory witticism "TMQ's compromise with his/my Baptist upbringing is to be pro-topless, but anti-gambling." And hey, if that's the image of yourself you want to present to the public, fine. But you don't get to constantly glorify the institution of cheerleaders, citing with approval the scantier costumes, insert gratuitous photos of the same into your column, and advocate the exploitation of bare-chested women, all of which include the objectification of women. If you are going to applaud treating women as unthinking objects for the gratification of base urges, you don't really have a leg to stand on when it comes to condemning the less amusing expressions of similarly base urges.

Over the last month or so, Sports Illustrated has been full of sports writers indulging their journalistic fantasies by editorializing about domestic violence, which is probably going to be overtaken by child abuse in the next issue. Guys. You are not real journalists. You are where real journalist go when they fail, exhibit A being Keith Olbermann, who has been fired from every non-sports job where he did not flee ahead of the axe or quit citing his lack of privileged treatment, or his own cowardice (seriously, in a world where journalists are routinely murdered and beheaded, Olbermann once stormed off in a huff because he was not given extra security at a GOP event, regardless of absolutely no one ever being attacked at such affairs, aside from the occasional Republican elected official by a Code Pink fanatic). And his new position with ESPN has been about as touted as any individual in that profession, which pretty much indicates the hierarchy of opinion journalism goes:
Real Journalists
Keith Olbermann
Sports Writers

Steve Rushin & Phil Taylor and the rest of their ilk are on the bottom. Their job is to talk about sports, not people involved in sports. We buy Sports Illustrated...well, some of us buy it because our niece's brownie troop is selling subscriptions and it was the least intellectually offensive periodical on the list...for news and stories about sports, not for the opinions of a bunch of men who failed equally at athletics, coaching AND journalism.

If you want to share your views on how the NFL is insensitive to the mistreatment of women, do it on your blog or somewhere where you are not taking people's money under the pretense of covering the NFL's eponymous activity.

And most importantly, if there is a wrong forum on which to complain about the way women are treated in the modern world, a periodical that devotes an entire issue each year to sexually objectifying women under the guise of a swimsuit catalog, is a strong contender. It's not a swimsuit catalog if the swimsuit is missing, and replaced by paint, or if the woman must cover her delicate regions with her less erotic anatomy or the use of inanimate props (as small as an iPod, according to, ironically enough, TMQ), or live animals. Someone really ought to suggest to "supermodels" that if they are getting paid to press their nipples or labia against a monkey or snake at the direction of a photographer, for the titilation of a male audience, maybe they should reevaluate their life choices and whether or not the term "prostitute" is a better label.

As the most widely read sports periodical in the nation, maybe Sports Illustrated should examine their own content when wondering where aspiring sportsmen might pick up a view of women as objects whose human dignity and personhood they can ignore.

Or failing that, shutting up and restricting itself to coverage of sporting events and flattering profiles of athletes, coaches and executives.