The Take a Knee Protest Ends With a Whimper

And that hurt puppy sound is coming from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell who quite possibly wins the highly coveted Too-Little-Too-Late Award for his response to the self-inflicted bazooka wound to the foot the NFL has administered to itself:

This is the same guy who was talking smack a couple of weeks ago when Trump decided the NFL protest needed more attention than it was getting.

The letter doesn’t order players to obey the NFL rules on the subject and stand and act like adults during the presentation of the colors and the National Anthem, but it is going to increase the pressure on team owners to make that the policy. Predictably, the left is not happy about this douchebaggery being given the heave-ho:

The @NFL owners & Roger Goodell are cowards who just surrendered to @realDonaldTrump. He unmanned you, you greedy, pathetic weasels.

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) October 10, 2017

I don’t think Trump won this so much as he successfully focused a lot of frustration with the league (commercial breaks, Byzantine rules) onto the issue of a handful of millionaires deciding that their pet grievance could be best publicized by demonstrating contempt for the colors and National Anthem. It is very much the same technique he used during the election.

Sports Illustrated has a cute, in the most gay way possible, “translation” of Goodell’s letter.

These are their communities and their problems. And while we’re happy to throw money at community initiatives that work to address symptoms of poverty and inequality (provided we get our due recognition for the display of charity), let’s keep it off the TV broadcast, gents.

…

It’s about honoring the flag, plain and simple. Don’t you know, when John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, they were protesting the flag and the anthem, not racial inequity at home. All this talk from people like Michael Bennett and Malcolm Jenkins about gaps in income and education and a racial disparity in the rate of killings at the hands of police—that’s all window dressing. These men dishonor the flag.

That said, we care deeply about our players’ concern for social issues, and we badly want to move past this money-sucking conflict and talk about real issues. Not that we would actually acknowledge what those issues are in this memo.

Also, this memo is not going say outright that we are going to compel players to stand for the anthem. But you get the idea.

This is supposed to be a zinger directed at Goodell but it really reflects just how out of touch the cheering section for this protest is. What the writer and the Mensa members who cooked up this nonsense are failing to grasp is what are the chances that NFL fans, or even non-NFL fans who believe America is something special, are going to contribute to any social cause endorsed by the noxious asses who knelt during the national anthem? What is their selling point as they tell me I need to support them because the nation is actually a sh***y place to live?

What the NFL did here is exactly what every gutless organization that has a large, mostly conservative/traditional base does when confronted by a challenge from the left. They cave. They suffer losses. They try to snap back but they’ve already shown their true colors. When the NFL dies, people will look back to this season and how the NFL dealt with a challenge by refusing to deal with it.

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