Raffy Update: The Bush League Rat Strikes Again

By Dr. Pepper of the Daily Pepper

Back on August 2, I had a lot of fun comparing the fortunes of George Bush to those of his favorite baseball player: Rafael Palmeiro. Bush had won reelection (still hard to say those words) on an ad campaign that emphasized his physical fitness. Slate.com could even plausibly attribute his sucesses to the benefits of steroids, beginning with the high profit margins involved in signing a disproportionately large number of chemically assisted sluggers to the Rangers during his tenure as face of the organization. Not that the Rangers ever succeeded at winning anything, but home runs sold tickets, and selling the ducats makes you buckets o' cash.

Now, as we noted a couple of days ago, Bush has gone from meathead to hooch hound. And just like the local wino who wags his finger at everyone else rather than deal with his own addiction, the good old boy has been trying to find scapegoats for his own absolute incompetence, whether it's friend-turned-fall guy Michael "Brownie" or his old friends, Southern local authorities who -- he alleges -- didn't ask quickly enough for federal assistance.

Meanwhile, now that Congress is investigating Palmeiro on perjury charges, Raffy is following his old friend's tried-and-true method: blaming someone else. Raffy has been telling federal investigators that it was teammate Miguel Tejada who injected him with steroids. Those very investigators have proved the charge completely baseless, but Raffy probably found it a convenient way of implying that he had only been on the 'roids since he joined the Orioles in 2004.

After his ratting was exposed in the press a few days ago, Raffy was promptly dismissed from the team. Teammates weren't too happy about his false accusations. Commented teammate and fellow slugger Jay Gibbons:

It's kind of like a family in here, and I said yesterday that you have to take responsibility for your own actions. You're a grown man and if you make a mistake, just own up to it. Everybody makes mistakes, but when you rat out a teammate, whatever he did, I don't know, I think he's denying it, it makes you seem like a coward.

Translation: Nobody minds when a good old boy falls off the wagon, but the other good old boys will hate you when you blame them for doing so.

In times of success, this is just how the Bush administration kept its own secrets. But when things go sour, the code of honor becomes a joke, and everyone starts pointing fingers in order to avoid responsibility.

Nonetheless, there will always be little pawns to stand up for the strong. The classic little guy, Chris Gomez (Tejada's backup at shortstop), expressed his naive trust in Raffy. When you read the following quotation from Gomez, think of F. Scott Fitzgerald's George Wilson, in The Great Gatsby:

I just find it kind of hard to believe that Raffy would deliberately do something like that.

Incredible. This about Palmeiro -- a guy whose life-story comes straight out of the film "Major League," whose previous major scandal was sleeping with several of his teammate's wives, and whose ad campaign for Viagra capitalized on that claim to fame to sell medication for erectile dysfunction!!! The good old boy wouldn't betray his teammates, would he? Hell, Gomez, he's probably slept with your wife, too!