Stick to ...

I used to get it all the time, back in my sports windbagging days. Occasionally I would stray outside the arena/stadium/playing field in my columnizing, on account of I have always had interests beyond Sportsball World, and because these days the intersection between Sportsball World and the wider world is more congested than ever.

Invariably I would get this pushback: Stick to sports.

Well ... two can play that game.

And so we come to Our Only Available President's latest comic foray into finding All The Best People.

It lands today on Stephen Moore, an economic commentator and former Trump campaign adviser whom OOAP has tabbed to serve on the Federal Reserve Board. It seems Moore has not always stuck to economics in the past, with unfortunate consequences.

Specifically, he wrote a series of columns back in 2000 that suggested he lived in a tree house with a  No Gurlz Allowed sign nailed to it.

These darn women, Moore wrote, shouldn't be allowed to mess with a man's sports, on account of sports are for men. So no women refs or announcers or beer vendors at men's college basketball games. Oh, and women athletes shouldn't be paid as much as men because, you know, they're women and not as good.

Is there no place, poor Stevie lamented, "where men can take a vacation from women"?

Well, no, Stevie, there isn't. It's the 21st century, dude. Maybe you heard about it while you were living back in there in the '50s with OOAP and the rest of the he-men.

Moore, of course, since has fallen back on the standard Saying Stupid Stuff Defense, which is that he was only joking when he wrote all that. In that he may inadvertently be correct, because so much of what he wrote does evoke laughter. But somehow I don't think that's how he meant it.

In any case, here's another situation where folks in the political sphere have wandered into Sportsball World, with hilarious results. The idea that women shouldn't be paid as much as men because they're not as good, for instance, is so old it has moss growing on it. And it fails to take into consideration such modern concepts as broadcast rights and drawing power.

The biggest commercial draw in tennis right now is Serena Williams, for instance. The U.S. women's soccer team is not only a bigger draw than the men, it's also a superior product; while the women are a world power, the men didn't even make the World Cup last time around. And when they have, it's deemed a triumph when they so much as get out of their group.

And do I really need to bring up the likes of the late Pat Summitt, Muffet McGraw and Kim Mulkey, who have consistently outperformed their male counterparts at their respective schools?

I didn't think so.

Still, ol' Stevie does seem to fit the Trumpian zeitgeist. Like a lot of the Trumpoids, he pines for the day when women knew their place and stayed out of a man's business. Just look at all the venom that pours forth from them whenever one of those damn women in Congress says something they don't like. Why, how dare they!

In any case ... Stevie, stick to economics, about which you might or might not know more. Leave sports to people who actually know what they're talking about.

Otherwise, we'll have to send Muffet over there to educate you.