Big Trouble in Little Havana- You got the Twitter, the Facebook, the people with the phones in your face recording your every move, the 24 hour news cycle, and all the rest of it. If you’re even kinda famous, every little slip up counts these days.
Take for example Foster Friess. Who’s Foster Friess, you ask? Just some rich dude. But he stepped into the spotlight when he started bankrolling Rick Santorum’s run for the Republican presidential nomination. You know Santorum. He’s the one who says you can only have sex on Wednesday evenings, in the missionary position, for the express purpose of making children. He also thinks homosexuality, masturbation, and Lori Levine are all sins.
Most donors, you know, they just stay in the background and funnel money. But Friess got a taste of the limelight and he liked it. He first made waves during the contraception healthcare hearings a couple months ago. He’s the guy who said that women should go back to the contraception they used back in his day: put an aspirin between their knees and squeeze. Classy, right?
If that wasn’t bad enough, just the other day, probably a bit bitter that his boy Ricky had to suspend operations because there aren’t enough crazy people to vote for him, Friess went on TV and said:
“Now that they’ve kind of trained their barrels on President Obama I’m afraid his, I hope his teleprompters are bulletproof.”
As someone who’s had a litttle one-on-one experience with the Secret Service (we’ll save the details for another day), I would expect Mr. Friess to be getting a knock on his door. But I know, I know, what’s this got do with sports?
Clearly the guy’s gaffe-prone, and so he reminds me of the sports world’s most entertaining gaffer of this century so far, Ozzie Guillen.
I’ve given Ozzie some love in this column before. I think he’s a top flight manager an outstanding source of entertainment. If nothing else, at this point he’s the closest thing we’ve got to Lou Pinella, and that alone’s worth something.
This week, the big to do of course was over his comments about Fidel Castro. For that he earned a five game suspension and a not very articulate but highly sanctimonious finger wagging from a man whom we all respect deeply, Commissioner Bud Selig.
*cough*
My take? Yeah, sure, the comments were stupid. Casto’s an aging goon who did a lot of bad things in his time. But you know what? This country has supported countless goons over the years when it serves our purposes, some of whom you’ve heard of, like Saddam Huessein and The Shah of Iran, and countless others you probably haven’t heard of, whom I don’t have time to list here, but among them are brutal dictators so absolutely horrific that they make Castro look like the Dalai Lama.
So the Marlins made an understandable business decision and pandered to some of their customers by offering Ozzie up as a sacrifice. Fine. Whatever. I don’t care, and Ozzie’s a big boy, he’ll be fine.
But Bud Selig? Shut your F-in mouth. That’s for starters. The Commissioner shouldn’t pander. It’s unbecoming, and quite frankly, it’s insulting to the rest of us who aren’t frothing at the mouth at what happened in 1959. But beyond that, it’s time to lift the Cuban embargo, which has been going on for over half a century, and no other nation in the world participates in because they all think it’s a goddamn joke.
I want to smoke Cubans with impunity.
Cheesy Bruin lights one up tomorrow.
