I’ve NEVER been a Patriots fan. Even before the whole “deflategate” thing. The biggest reason is because they have WON so much. Being a lifelong Lakers’ (and a TrailBlazers’ fan when I lived in Portland and went to quite a few Blazer games), I first hated the Celtics when they won, then I hated the Pistons when they won, and then I hated the Bulls when they won.
Nothing personal. I would have told you Larry Bird or Isaiah Thomas – or even Darth Vader himself, Bill Laimbeer – or Michael Jordan were awesome stars and I wish I had them on my team. It was almost as much fun to root against a team as for one. And when the team you love to hate plays the team you love to love, well, that’s the catharsis of sports at its best.
But “catharsis” is for those who were made in God’s image and have the quality of being formed in His likeness. We can not only rise to the heights of joy, but we can get over our depths of low and still be happy people. But Democrats of course believe they are the random products of the magic power of enough billions of years to claim anything can happen, plus the even more magic power of chance, plus the bizarre notion that mutation is actually a good thing that produces positive changes. Anything but God, and certainly anything but the God of the Bible.
Catharsis is for human beings, not for mutated bugs who over the course of billions of years exchanged their little roach heads for human-looking ones.
And so we have this from a man who comes from generations of Patriots’ fans, but can’t be a fan any more because he’s too butthurt because being butthurt along with being a hypocrite is what makes a Democrat a Democrat:
Rooting for Tom Brady used to be easy. Until Donald Trump came along.
The agony of being a New England Patriots fan who didn’t vote for the president.
By Luke O’Neil February 3 at 6:00 AM
Luke O’Neil is a writer in Boston.
BOSTON — My father and I have a predictable routine when we speak on the phone, a not uncommon one around here in Massachusetts, it’s safe to assume. After cataloging the well-being of various family members, the conversation inevitably turns to the latest on-the-field exploits of one Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr. I probably don’t need to tell you our opinion of him is generally quite favorable! So talented. So handsome. My mother and I have a similar, albeit inverted routine of our own. There’s one person we never talk about, if only to maintain a fragile semblance of civility: President Trump.
Brady can relate to that right now. If there’s one thing that can reliably be said about the purposefully enigmatic — or boorishly obtuse, depending on your rooting interests — New England Patriots quarterback, set to compete in his record seventh Super Bowl this weekend, it’s that he really, really does not want to talk about Trump.
“If people want to take sides, you know, they can obviously do that,” he said this week. “It’s everyone’s right. They have a right to do that. And I have a right to stay out of it, too.”
But when it comes to Trump, no one can be apolitical. Brady’s nonchalant neutrality is itself a political statement, one that says he’s either too rich to worry about how Trump’s whirlwind of chaos will affect his life, or worse, too indifferent about the rapidly diminishing prospects of those who are not. This isn’t easy to say about someone I’ve idolized as an emblem of determination and athletic heroism for more than 15 years, but here in the reliably blue precincts of New England, Brady is already assuming a strange new role in the eyes of many fans: Tom Brady looks like a loser. Tom Brady looks like a coward.
Would that it were simple enough for the millions of Trump-opposed Patriots fans like myself to simply wash our hands of it all and abandon ship. But it’s no easier to divorce yourself from a team you’ve supported your entire life than it would be to cast out a family member, and believe me, I’ve considered both options. Making matters somewhat more complicated, no one knows exactly where Brady stands, precisely because he’s been so obstinately vague. With other athletes, it’s a much easier decision to cut the cord. We loved star tight end Aaron Hernandez until it turned out he was a murderer. Likewise, many Ravens fans turned on Ray Rice when video of him punching out his wife emerged. With Brady, we’re confronted with a wishy-washy attempt to have it both ways. Were he to come out and say that like Trump, he thinks Mexicans are rapists, or imply that any refugee is likely to be a radical Islamic terrorist, that would be one thing. Instead, he makes mealy-mouthed appeals to friendship.
It didn’t have to be this way. None of us would’ve given much thought to Brady’s politics if he hadn’t introduced the idea himself early in the campaign, when reporters spotted a Make America Great Again hat in his locker. (Who does Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan support? I have no idea.) At the time, Brady tried to brush off the idea that he was endorsing Trump, calling him an old friend and adding “it would be great” if Trump were president. Having observed Brady and interviewed him a couple times, I have no doubt he did not intend it to become much of a story — if there’s anything the Patriots organization disdains more than losing, it’s “distractions.” But as with all things Trump, the story quickly grew larger than anyone would have imagined. All of a sudden, Brady’s conspicuous absence when the team visited then-President Barack Obama in the White House after winning the Super Bowl in 2015 didn’t seem so innocent. And Trump couldn’t seem to go a week without invoking his great friendship with Brady on the campaign trail. Brady, you see, like Trump, is a winner.
Brady, though. Brady hurt. Particularly when contrasted with the outright bravery of Colin Kaepernick, who kick-started a movement this season when he refused to stand for the national anthem, or other megastars such as LeBron James who’ve been outspoken politically, or NBA coaches such as Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr, who’ve strongly criticized Trump’s ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim nations. It’s not so much that Brady apparently values his golf-buddy friendship with Trump enough to ignore the president’s very clear xenophobic worldview — not to mention the fact that he was caught on tape bragging of his ability to get away with sexual assault. It’s that he won’t even own it. Be a Republican if you must, but at least take a stand. I wouldn’t have loved to have seen Brady supporting Mitt Romney, but Trump is different. Say what you will about former Red Sox great Curt Schilling, but at least he signs his name to the unhinged screeds he pukes up on his website.
With so many other pressing issues, it’s irrational to care so much about who Brady supports. But if there’s anything that disables our critical thinking function, it’s sports. (And presidential politics.) No one rationalizes fandom. By its very nature, it defies scrutiny; you either support a team or you don’t. Besides, anyone who lets themselves think too much about professional football — a jingoistic, militarized enterprise that devastates its players physically and mentally and is led by a cabal of voraciously greedy owners hellbent on squeezing every last dollar out of taxpayers that they can for stadiums — wouldn’t remain a fan very long. Willful cognitive dissonance is as long-standing a football tradition as the forward pass.
That hasn’t stopped my friends and me from trying to find new justifications for rooting for the Pats, though. On a fan Facebook group I run, the header image is safety Devin McCourty and tight end Martellus Bennett raising their fists in power during the playing of the national anthem earlier this season. Bennett, in particular, has become a favorite of ours, one of the more interesting, thoughtful and politically engaged Patriots players in memory. He’s said he probably wouldn’t visit the Trump White House were they to win on Sunday. The Patriots roster is loaded with decent, non-publicly-Trump-supporting players. Special-teams captain Matthew Slater is said to be an exemplary human being, as is star cornerback Malcolm Butler. Mercifully, Rob Gronkowski, a harmless oaf, has not yet held forth on the relative merits of school vouchers. We look for hope, or at least an absence of despair, wherever we can find it.
None of my friends has gone so far as to say we’re turning on the team entirely. But there’s no doubt that we feel differently about Brady than we did before. I would still prefer if he won the game on Sunday, but I won’t be quite so heartbroken as usual if he doesn’t. Trump was right about one thing, in the end. There’s going to be a lot of winning going on around here. So much winning, it might make us sick.
Do you understand this whining little fools’ thesis? He’s arguing that you literally HAVE to worship the beast and take his mark on your right hand, or on your forehead, and renounce all things Jesus in order not to be hated. I mean, Brady doesn’t have a right to campaign for Trump or even to vote for Trump or even to remain silent or more incredibly even not to NOT publicly demonize Trump. No, he’s got “to take a stand,” defined as an überfascist stand for the überviolent fascists who are burning and rioting and looting and hating.
And if he doesn’t take the mark of the beast and worship him, well, Luke O’Neil will cease and desist from his lifelong love of the Patriots.
Because “Hate Trumps Love,” to spin the leftist logo that the way they put it was an oxymoron as people literally carried “Love Trumps Hate” signs to RIOT.
I never thought I would see the day when I would become a passionate fan of the New England Patriots. I mean, this is really amazing.
But a turd who is as much of a “I’ll take my ball and go HOME!” whining little puke as this jackass Luke O’Neil really ought to be butthurt for life.
I mean, holy crap, THERE IS SO MUCH LEFTISM IN SPORTS IT IS BEYOND UNREAL.
The worst leftist political channel on the planet isn’t MSNBC, it’s ESPN.
A back-up puke named Colin Kaepernick fired up the imagination of American-hating Democrats everywhere when he refused to honor the United States of America or its flag because apparently there are too many rich scumbags like Colin Kaepernick who won’t redistribute all their wealth to black people or something like that.
He inspired a generation of leftist puke punk turd delinquints to have as much disrespect for their country as he does.
I mean, hey, Colin, I hear that the North Korean Kimworshipers have an opening for quarterback: why not try out?
Before that, it was LeBron James on the court wearing a shirt that said, “I can’t breathe” to show he sides with the pukes against the decent people.
Before that it was the abject contempt and derision and outright hatred of all things Tim Tebow, because he was, after all, a devout Christian who wanted to inspire kids toward something OTHER THAN urinating on their national flag before trying to light it on fire.
No Democrat wants to hear that Jesus loves you, EVER; they want to hear about how to better riot against our despised Constitution and our flag and the republic for which it stands.
I remember when Rush Limbaugh was blocked from trying to buy a part ownership of the St. Louis Rams before they went back to Los Angeles and became pretty much the worst football team in the history of the entire space time universe. Basically, the rabid, hysterical campaign against Limbaugh from being able to participate in the NFL was that he had said “racist” things on his radio program. It didn’t matter that there existed no audio anywhere of him ever saying any of the stuff they claim he said in spite of the fact that he’s on NATIONAL DAMN RADIO; it didn’t matter that the Rush Limbaugh program produces a word-for-word transcript of the program and it wasn’t there, either. No, the “evidence” was taken from a leftwing hate site that basically claims that as they were listening to some leftist hate site, this “transcript” of Rush Limbaugh came to their warped, delusional, psychotic progressive-liberalism-devoured brains. It didn’t matter: the “evidence” stood and Rush was banned.
There are a million examples of rabid progressive liberalism being ALL OVER professional sports in EVERY professional sport.
But that’s not the problem, is it?
No, the problem is that there might be ONE CONSERVATIVE somewhere.
And the hysterical, psychotic paranoia that is today’s Democrat Party cannot tolerate that.
Anymore than they can tolerate one conservative being able to speak at a university without having a Kristallnacht.
They cannot tolerate ANY idea that disagrees with them.
And these fascists have now had a whole damn BUNCH of Kristallnacht moments. Because that is who they are.
These people are STALINISTS. And their butthurt hate for anything approaching actual, legitimate TOLERANCE where one tolerates disagreement and puts up with people they don’t agree with or even like as part of being decent members of civil society are simply not in their little bug souls.
So we get Madonna to the cheers of a million butthurt women who want the right to murder their babies while the fathers of those babies are rendered powerless to have anything whatsoever to do with whether their own children can even LIVE; we’ve got Sarah Silverman publicly demanding a freaking MILITARY COUP because what Nazi wouldn’t want a military coup.
And if you don’t do that, Tom Brady, well, we demon-possessed bureaucrats (i.e. “Democrasts”) will hate on you if only for keeping your mouth shut when we demand that you join us in mindlessly screaming rabid hate.
So here’s abject mockery of every butthurt Democrat.
You first made me a Trump fan with your outrageous in-your-face democracy-despising Nazism.
Now you’ve even made me a Patriots fan.
I hope Brady throws for 10 touchdowns. And then gives Donald Trump the credit saying he called The Donald and got a hot tip because The Donald is awesome in all things, after all.
