Sunday, July 29, 2007

Truth is Beauty

Lindsay Lohan got arrested. You may have been in Outer Mongolia and not heard about it yet. She was driving on a suspended license, with alcohol in her system and cocaine in her pocket.

The cocaine wasn't hers. It belongs to a friend, she says.

Barry Bonds is about to break Hank Aaron's home run record. The steroids in his pocket are something he knows nothing about. All he's ever used is an herbal cream his trainer gave him. Completely legal...unless someone was lying to him...

The Attorney General of the United States was on Capitol Hill again this week. He was called to explain the continued downward spiral in that cabinet department known (with increasing irony) as Justice. He explained nothing, beyond the fact that he apparently can't remember what he had for breakfast. How the man ever passed a bar exam is beyond me.

Okay, it's really not. Because, like virtually everyone else watching his performance (and there is truly no other word for it) before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I didn't believe that he couldn't remember the things he said he couldn't remember.

Just like I don't believe that the cocaine in Lindsay Lohan's pocket belongs to a friend, and that Barry Bonds has never knowingly taken steroids.

In Bonds' case, it explains so much. I was a Big Time Giants Fan when we traded with Pittsburgh to allow Barry to come home to the Bay Area. I remember those first couple of years when my friends and I would marvel at his off-season conditioning. He just kept getting bigger. And we just thought he lifted a lot of weights. (Oh, and pinstripes are slimming, so a Giants uniform made him look bigger.)

Sometimes I long for that naivete. Because it sure seems like we're being lied to on a regular basis, and are becoming conditioned to simply accept it. The fact that Alberto Gonzalez is still the Attorney General is a travesty, but it seems like it's going to stay that way for a while. Just as we will continue an ill-advised, illegal, immoral war, the justification of which changes more than Lindsay Lohan's mug shots.

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