Pelini Was Right: The Problem With "Fans"

Even with the crazy stories surrounding Monday's Navy Yard shootings, and the federal government on the verge of a shutdown, our attention this week has been a bit diverted from our usual focus on politics. As we've noted previously on more than one occasion, our entire staff proudly hails from Nebraska - and for the past few days, Nebraska Cornhusker fans have been up in arms over the actions their head football coach, Bo Pelini.

Pelini's streak of bad luck began last Saturday, when he, his coaches, and his players took a 21-3 halftime lead, and turned it into an embarrassing 41-21 loss at home to UCLA. As longtime true Husker fans, we weren't as disappointed in the loss as we were in the way much of the team  - both players and coaches - behaved in an uninspired way, not appearing to give their usual 110%. We grumbled relatively quietly, and outwardly hoped that the ugly loss might serve as an educational tool to remind both the student athletes and coaches that no opponent should be overlooked.

Things got worse, though, for Pelini and Husker fans, as sportswriter and longtime media colleague of ours Steve Sipple noted on Monday. That's when a secret tape, recorded in 2011, was released. On that recording, Coach Pelini was caught venting against ungrateful and poorly behaved Husker fans in the wake of the 2011 Husker comeback win against Ohio State.

We can't defend Coach Pelini's actions on Saturday, or the less-then-gentlemanly public argument he and former Husker player Tommie Frazier got into through the media, following the game. We did, however, think the rush by Nebraska's Chancellor and Athletic Director to force Pelini to apologize for cussing out the "new breed" of Husker "fans" in 2011 was wrong.

Bo Pelini was right to be mad at the trashy, childish, spoiled behavior of "new breed" Husker fans - and if you're a fan of any sport, frankly, we think you should be as mad as he was.

Sports fans today, at almost every level, are often boorish, rude, and crass in ways they didn't use to be. They now openly cuss out players, coaches, and officials in ways that would make sailors blush - and that's just at Little League games. By the time these "fans" cheer and jeer their college and pro teams, their language is often far worse, and their attitude of entitlement to perpetual winning teams and seasons is beyond obnoxious.

In the case of Husker football fans, who have long called themselves "the best fans in college football," that kind of boorish behavior towards coaches and players has become far more common, yet it's still rarely acknowledged publicly - like when Husker fans booed their own team at halftime of the 2011 Ohio State game (which Nebraska came back from three touchdowns behind to win).

The new breed of Husker football fans, like other similar "fans" today, insist their aims are true. They complain that Pelini isn't like their historically winning coaching legends of Osborne and Devaney. Sports "fans" like that have short memories, though.

Back in the day, before Coach Devaney and his Huskers won a National Championship, fans were screaming for his head on a platter for several years. Now there's a statue of him at Memorial Stadium. Coach Osborne's story is much the same. Prior to his national titles, he was always accused of not being able to win "the big one." Now the field bears Osborne's name, and he too has a statue at the stadium.

For all of Pelini's personal faults, he is doing his job quite well. With five straight nine-win seasons to open his head coaching career, Pelini joins both Devaney and Osborne as the only Husker football coaches in the school's history to accomplish that feat. Yet that still hasn't seemed to be enough for those ungrateful "fans" - many of whom have been demanding Pelini be fired after the events of the past few days.

For that kind of screaming "fan" no achievement will ever be good enough - which makes Coach Pelini's 2011 private outburst both understandable and just, in our opinion.

True Husker fans - like true fans of any team - know: Being a fan is like being part of a family. You don't always like every member of your family, all the time. But you support your family both when they soar and when they crash - and you love them even if they act like jackasses in public on occasion.

And sometimes, when they curse you out in private, they're right for doing so.

Testing The Limits Of Sanity

Last night, as we began collecting information for today's commentary, we realized that so much of the information surrounding Monday's mass shooting in Washington, DC is still in flux, doing that story justice at this point, would be nearly impossible.

The shooter's identity has been confirmed, along with the number of killed and wounded, and the basic timeline also seems to be coalescing. That said, at the time we're putting together Tuesday's edition, investigators are far from finding a motive for the killings. Frankly, we can't help but think mental illness must have played some part.

As we stated in the wake of the Connecticut school shooting last December, there are multiple components to the gun violence and mass killing incidents in America, and our sorely underutilized American mental health care system is just one of those.

Still, stating with any certainty that the Navy Yard killer was insane is merely speculation at this point.

The nearly homicidal actions of the extremist tea partiers on the right, however, are totally nuts - especially on issues like shutting down the government and health insurance for all Americans.

As Noam Scheiber points out in the New Republic, and as Ezra Klein has been warning for some time over at the Washington Post's Wonkblog, the danger that the government will shut down two weeks from today is no crazy nightmare. As Scheiber details, sources in the White House make it clear that the President has no intention of giving in to the childish games House Republicans are attempting to play with the debt ceiling.

In fact, as Scheiber outlines, and Jonathan Bernstein highlights over at The Plum Line, Speaker Boehner is almost being incentivized to let a shutdown happen, to scare some members of the Republican caucus into realizing just how crazy the tea party extremists among them truly are.

Greg Sargent at The Plum Line takes those same GOP lawmakers, and looks at their actions through the lens of a recent Pew poll which proves that fewer than one in four Americans want Republican lawmakers to keep trying to kill Obamacare. That means that more than 75 percent of Americans either support Obamacare or they at least want Congress to make it work.

That may seem counterintuitive at first, but as Greg points out, those aren't the most important poll numbers in the batch. The key data in the Pew poll are the voting trends that prove most Republican Congresspersons and Senators aren't completely crazy. As Greg astutely points out, "Among Republicans who say they 'always' vote in primaries, 53 percent oppose the law and want lawmakers to make it fail."

In other words, that relatively small but passionate group of people who want Obamacare to fail - and indeed, want the whole federal government to shut down - are the people a key segment of House and Senate Republicans are pandering to, almost exclusively. Those members of Congress who are pandering to that elite bunch of right-wing nuts - at the expense of all their other constituents - aren't insane, so much as they are selfish.

That said, if those members of Congress allow their nuttiest constituents to blow up the federal government's finances, we certainly don't think the actions of those Congresspersons will be labeled in the history books as 'sane' or 'rational.'

Time To Bridge The Gap Again

Over the weekend two events happened that we believe signal a subtle yet important change in direction for the United States.

First, much to relief of people around the world, the U.S., Russia, and Syria reached an agreement on Syria's chemical weapons. That pact is a crucial step, and while tentative, effectively nullifies the threat of U.S. military involvement in Syria for the foreseeable future, and once again proves that diplomacy is a far more effective foreign policy tool than 'Shock n' Awe' ever was.

Second, and in some ways, even more important, was Lawrence Summers withdrawing his name for consideration to be the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Summers - one of the men responsible for the massive deregulation which led to the Great Recession - already had received the public opposition of several key Democrats and at least one Republican, along with what appeared to be a solid rebuke by Sen. Elizabeth Warren. So it seems almost fitting that as the season of summer ends, so too does the chance for Larry Summers to destroy the economy again.

With both of the above items firmly in mind, we thought it might be a great time to look at exactly where America is on the five year anniversary of the collapse of Wall Street and the beginning of the Great Recession. Sadly, as we noted in Friday's expanded edition, America already appears to be in a new "Gilded Age' with the gap between the richest 1% and the rest of America deeper turning into a yawning chasm that's effectively swallowed the American middle class.

President Obama's political team obviously agrees with our idea, as they're set to focus on the subject of his economic successes this week, and compare them to where America was five years ago, on the eve of the collapse. Mr. Obama and his economic team have accomplished some fairly amazing economic feats these last five years, in spite of the suicide caucus of the GOP - the group who will likely kill their own party in their feckless attempts to take down President Obama.

Consider the TARP program, the rescue of Wall Street, the stimulus, and the auto bailout that Obama took over from G.W. Bush. President Obama and his economic team were able to use all of these to stop the hemorrhaging of Wall Street, and the near-collapse of the U.S. auto industry, and turn economy in a positive direction, all with the least possible support of Congress. Chrysler is already making steps to become a public company again.

Even with all that success, most of America - except the richest of the rich - have yet to recover from the devastating gambling of Wall Street's worst. Neil Irwin and Brad Plumer of Wonkblog on Friday published a devastating series of charts that prove what most Americans already know.

For the top 1% of Americans, the recession is already over. For the rest of America - for MOST of America - the recovery has only barely begun.

It's with glee then that we note Janet Yellen, now the likely nominee to chair the Fed, has a long list of qualifications, some of which Ezra Klein pointed out Sunday evening, including her work at the Fed since 2004. Ms. Yellen also wants the Fed to concentrate on the one thing Americans now need in our financial sector more than any other: Someone at the top more concerned with putting more people back to work at honest wage levels than with protecting the interest rates of trust fund babies and corporate cronies.

President Clinton once talked about "building a bridge to the 21st Century," and as he left office, that bridge had been begun to be built, as the middle class enjoyed prosperity in equal or better measure than at anytime since the end of World War II. As we all now know, that bridge was blown up by the hubris and greed of the Wall Street barons, and the two wars of the Bush/Cheney neo-con chicken hawks. Instead of a bridge, there's a massive gap where responsibile governing and support of the American middle class should have been.

If President Obama truly wants to make the next three years his legacy, he could do nothing more important than rebuilding that bridge to the future for the middle class, over the income inequality gap we now all face.