They Moved Off The Imperial System Years Ago

I’m a little sad to see the day that Congress is more competent than the NHL

Happy New Year everybody!  Nearly the entirety of 2013 is ahead of us, which means lots more of whatever this stuff is that Jeremy dumps on the world.  Lucky us!  It appears he's going to start the year with a rare and special political rant.  

A new year always holds new promise.  Things will get better, people will be better, and end to pestilence, and famine...and pestilence.  

This mildly obscure cartoon quote comes to you courtesy of "The Hub" which will begin airing Animaniacs cartoons again starting next week.  Faboo!  

The last gasp of 2012 was chock full of excitement that nobody really wanted.  The Fiscal Cliff, the end of the world as we know it (For the record, we still feel fine), and the NHL lockout were prime examples.  I'd like to focus my rageface on the NHL, if I may...but not just yet.  

See, the "fiscal cliff" was important.  We, as a country, spend a large amount of money, technically referred to as a "Metric Crapload."  We use it to buy stuff people need...like an army, and retirement because not everybody can work forever, and a helping hand for people who lose their jobs because the "Job Creators" find it more financially beneficial to move the jobs to foreign countries that don't provide these services.  Lately, to the horror of many, the government decided to use some of this money on the most unholy thing of all...hospitals.  I'll wait for you to finish gasping.  Long ago, we stopped collecting enough money to pay for all of this stuff, and an active decision was made to collect even less.  Sure, it was beneficial to us as individuals, and may have even been what we collectively needed at the time, but it took into account growth in economic sectors that was unsustainable and no longer existent, as well as many of those jobs that are now gone.  Net result...it's not what we need now.  So we fight over deficit spending versus revenues, what services need to be provided and who's going to pay for it.  And the way we reach decisions now is not to agree to disagree and work out a mutually beneficial solution, but to bitterly and divisively argue in whatever public forum we can find, yammering on and on about how we're right, and the other side is destroying the process, and to use tactics instead of negotiations until we're at the very edge of actual ruination to actually do anything.  Then, we finally come to the agreement everyone knew we'd make all along, we blame the other side for causing it to happen the way that it did, and finally publicly ridicule the results because it's not what we wanted.  

At some point in that last paragraph, I mentally switched from Congress to the NHL, and you didn't even notice. 

See, the two entities are frighteningly similar, and not in just the levels of arrogance and stupidity about facing the issues before them.  They both have major economic problems brought on by their own policies, they both involve tense and heated negotiations between two parties with heads that the other side despises, and they're both using the exact same brinksmanship tactics to extract a minimal gain from the other side that is far more than made up by the damage caused by dragging out the process as long as they have.  

I guess I just had lower expectations for Congress.  

They've actually come up with enough of a solution for the Fiscal Cliff to kick the problem a couple months down the road (Yay!  More whole months of this crap!), while hockey sits in a self-generated limbo not-so-slowly descending into oblivion.  

Don't get me wrong...I'm not blaming Gary Bettman for all of it.  Though, I truly think that the best PR move the NHL can make after this fiasco is over is to give him his walking papers the next day.  After the last CBA negotiation the NHL went through, which cost the league the 04-05 season and most of the casual fans' respect it had as a professional sport, there was supposed to be a new era of co-ownership and cooperation between the league and its players.  It was supposed to be the Golden Era, and in many ways it was, but the figurehead of the lost season (Bettman) remained.  The league started crying foul not long before the CBA expired last year (right after popping the champagne and toasting another year of record revenues), and the players union caught wind of something funky in the air, so they did the worst thing they could have possibly done and hired Don Fehr to lead them.  Yes, the same Don Fehr that cost baseball the 1994 World Series.

Now, seeing Don Fehr on the other side, and knowing that they had a tough negotiation ahead of them, the league responded by doing the worst thing THEY could have possibly done.  They offered the most egregiously foul CBA proposal they could cobble together, with a 25% pay cut, restriction after restriction on the players, and all to the benefit of the league owners.  Instantly, any thoughts of cooperation were shot, the co-ownership became a fairy tale, and instead of two groups working together to solve issues for the greater good, it was once again Us vs Them, and the lockout began.  

Let's play "What If?"  What if the league had started working with the players on solving the financial issues last year instead of waiting until the CBA expired and blaming the issues on them?  What if the players union didn't hire Don Fehr?  What if Gary Bettman had stepped down after the last time he destroyed the sport?  What if Congress actually worked together instead of spending their time trying to convince me that they have it oh so rough, and the other side is pure evil?  What if Congress is bored now and wants to help sort out the NHL's issues? 

I don't even want to think about that.