by Walter Brasch
A federal grand jury last week indicted retired pitcher Roger Clemens on charges he lied to Congress.
In February 2008, Clemens, a seven time Cy Young winner, voluntarily met with a House committee and testified he didn't knowingly use steroids or human growth hormones. The only evidence against Clemens appears to be the testimony of his former trainer, Brian McNamee, who claims to have injected Clemens with the drugs about 40 times between 1998 and 2001. Clemens says he was led to believe the injections were Vitamin B-12 and an anesthetic, Lidocaine, both legal under Major League Baseball guidelines. McNamee cut a deal with the Department of Justice to avoid prosecution. Clemens could be sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Probably half the country thinks Clemens took illegal drugs. Probably half the country thinks he didn't take the drugs and was set up by his trainer. But that's not the important issue.
First of all, does anyone know why the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform even held a hearing about steroid usage among baseball players? Was there a dry spell and the Committee couldn't find anything in the government that needed to be reformed?
If the committee thought public figures taking illegal drugs was bad, why didn't it look inside itself first? If it did, there would be a high probability it could easily have found members of Congress and their staffs who also took steroids, snorted coke, or mainlined harder drugs. Stoned and wasted Congressional staffers pose a greater danger to society than any athlete.
This is the same body of legislators who created the House Unamerican Activities Committee in the early 1950s to strip Americans of their First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and association. It also ordered contempt of Congress charges and perjury against witnesses who told the truth--but not what Congress wanted to hear.
This is the Congress that in 1994 didn't ask for convictions for perjury for any of the seven CEOs of major tobacco companies who testified under oath that nicotine wasn't addictive. But that, and much more, is history. The present 21st century Congress has much more to answer about its actions.
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