The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) has become a mirror of the dysfunction infecting the federal government. The parallels are striking.
President Trump arrived on the political scene just in time to rescue America from what would have been a fatal decline. He is without doubt the premier statesman of the century so far.
Also without doubt, one of the best female basketball players in sports is relative newcomer Caitlyn Clark. She is also the most maligned — both verbally and, astonishingly, physically, as in brutally assaulted on the court by competing players. These physical assaults are far beyond the normal kinds of collisions arising from intense contests. They are deliberate and blatant. Moreover, they are dangerous. Opponents have scratched at Clark’s eyes.
This brings us to the officiating. Penalty “calls” made by referees are well known to be controversial in many sports, including the “no calls,” when game officials fail to flag a player for a violation of the rules. When Clark is on the court, such “no calls” are almost predictable. Clark will almost certainly be fouled, in what are called “hard fouls,” during certain games, but the officials tend to either make no call or call only minor fouls when the violation clearly has been major.
Next, league management. Where have the league’s owners been? Why haven’t officials been warned, or fired? Why haven’t players committing serious infractions been suspended or worse?
There does seem to be some movement within the league management to fix the problems heretofore mentioned, even if the motivation is from embarrassment and complaints from the public rather than from a sincere effort to benefit the sport.
Better yet, there are signs that the Trump administration may be on the verge of a breakthrough in being able to implement its policies, for which voters voted. The Supreme Court has made a ruling that, it appears, restrains the lower courts from continuing to rule unconstitutionally that they, not the president, make national executive policy. What took the High Court so long?
Back to basketball: Caitlyn Clark is the WNBA’s most popular player. The league was struggling to survive before she came along. Since then, games in which she plays are sold out, even on the road. Her merchandise is also a hot seller, even to fans of opposing teams. Both Clark’s team and the opposing teams benefit from her presence, as does the WNBA in general. Even people like me, uninterested in basketball, and who barely even knew that there is a professional women’s league, have developed an interest.
It makes no sense, then, that the opposing players would not be happy to benefit from her popularity. It makes no sense that the officials would expose her to the risk of career-ending injury. It makes less sense that the league owners would permit this travesty.
This commentary is not a whine session about a sport. It is about the federal government, and the fiefdoms within it that act against the national interest. The WNBA is small potatoes in comparison, but precisely for that reason, it is easier to see its flaws than to see the corresponding dangerous defects in the behemoth that has become the bureau-ocracy, which has for so long ruled our lives like little kings.
Elon Musk and, spectacularly, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) exposed to the public a small portion of the vast corruption in our federal agencies. We are shocked to our core, and more is yet to come, but the most disturbing revelation has been not the abysmal waste alone, but the ferocious insistence by the left that it must continue. That seems suicidal, but to the political left, even national suicide may seem rational. Why? Corruption supplies leftists with power through money-laundering. It funds leftist causes, supports their re-election campaigns, and rewards their donors.
But wait. It’s their country also, not just ours, that is endangered by the never-ending debt crisis. If the nation falls into terminal decline, if we become unable to sustain our system, and if foreign enemies actually win a major war against us, then not only will we on the right be destroyed, but so will the left.
Don’t they know that?
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