Would Appointing a War Criminal as Commissioner Redeem the NFL?

by William Norman Grigg
Sep. 16, 2014

Former NFL star Ray Rice pleaded guilty of abusing a woman whom he later married, and was fired by the League after a video of the crime was made public.

Former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice was an architect of an illegal war of aggression that resulted in the slaughter of a half-million people, the displacement of millions more, trillions of dollars in debt, and the creation of a nihilistic terrorist group that has now been designated our existential threat du jour. She is a war criminal who remains impenitent despite abundant proof of the crimes to which she is a party.

The NFL is seeking to rehabilitate its public reputation amid accumulating scandals. This inspired Beltway scribe Susan Milligan to propose that the League could redeem itself by replacing "one Rice with another" -- that is, firing incumbent NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and hiring War Criminal Condi Rice as his successor.

Stalin famously said that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. In contemporary America, one domestic violence incident in which the victim survived constitutes a career-ending scandal, but helping to orchestrate the murder of 500,000 foreigners is a glorious patriotic accomplishment.

Installing Rice as NFL Commissioner would usefully demolish any pretense that the NFL is something other than a corporatist appendage of the Warfare State.