On the stump(ed)

So The Game Show Host was on the hustings in Pennsylvania the other day, talking as usual about how great he was gonna be (Yuuuuge! He's gonna be yuuuuge!). And, being in the vicinity, he brought up Joe Paterno, the legendary football coach at Penn State.

Asked how he was doing, or something to that effect.

Which was unfortunate, because Joe Paterno is dead at the present time.

He passed in 2012, his reputation stained by his lack of engagement while top assistant Jerry Sandusky was serially abusing young boys. Somehow the news never got back to The Game Show Host, seeing as how he spends so much time going bankrupt, driving entire professional football leagues into the ditch and putting his name on various things other people build for him.

Look. I don't blame Donny. He was born to privilege and, along with the sense of entitlement that too often comes with that, he wears the blinders of the born to privilege. He also wears, these days, the blinders of the politician, whose focus is solely on what all of us can do to help him get elected.

This is why it's always been the Blob's official position that politicians should never try to woo the voters by pretending to be Like Them, especially when being Like Them means talking sports. Most politicians don't know jack hooey about sports, simply because sports isn't on their radar. The only presidents in my lifetime who could intelligently talk sports were Richard Nixon (a devoted NFL fan) and Barack Obama, an ESPN junkie who can talk hoops with the best of them.

(And who, by the way, has never pandered to the voters by pretending allegiances he didn't have. He's a White Sox fan and he makes no apologies for it. And once, while in Wisconsin, he told the crowd that, yeah, the Packers were pretty good that season, but the Bears were gonna get 'em next season).

As for everyone else ... well, there are numerous examples of gruesome collisions between politicians and sports. There was the time John Kerry bellowed "How 'bout those Buckeyes?" to an audience of Michigan fans. And there was that other time (speaking of pandering) Hillary Clinton, who grew up in Chicago as a Cubs fan, pretended to be a Yankees fan while running for the Senate in New York.

She should have lost her Cubs fan card for that one. No Cubs fan worthy of being called such would ever stoop so low as to profess admiration for the (bleeping) Yankees.

Or for Joe Paterno. Especially if, you know, you're a little fuzzy on his current status.