Roger the Dodger

Super Bowl Week kicks off today, and what a week it will be. Fun. Zaniness. Glitzy parties that HELLO YOU'RE NOT INVITED TO. Supreme acts of moral cowardice.

Wait, what?

Yes boys and girls, that last fits, too. It happens today, in fact, when Roger the Hammer Goodell becomes Roger the Dodger by conducting his traditional Super Bowl news conference A) before a lot of the media has yet to arrive, and B) by making the event invitation only.

Handpicking journalists for a presser is never a good look in an allegedly free nation with an allegedly free press, smacking as it does of state-run media in totalitarian regimes. But it's especially reprehensible, and gutless, for a private entity that benefits hugely from public money to do so in a week when it already controls so much of the message.

And if you're saying now "Mr. Blob, how do you know whom Goodell invited?", I'll say I don't. But I can add. And if the NFL making Goodell's "media availability" invitation only isn't an attempt to weed out reporters who might ask Roger the Dodger uncomfortable questions, then two-plus-two doesn't equal four.

And there are uncomfortable questions.

Like, what's up with all the inconsistent officiating that continues to plague the league, and what does the league plan to do about it? And what about the league getting so cozy with gambling -- for God's sake, they're in Vegas this week -- when for decades it kept the gambling industry several arms' lengths away? And why does a multi-billion-dollar industry need to strong-arm the taxpayers to underwrite its teams?

Because every time someone hits up the public to help subsidize some swank new palace to lure an NFL franchise with a wandering eye, that's essentially what's happening. And how much did the taxpayers kick in for the swank palace Vegas built to steal the Raiders from Oakland, anyway? And in which they'll be playing the Super Bowl in six days?

Roger ain't gonna like being confronted with his league's naked greed. Hence the  stratagem of minimizing the chances of it happening.

Gutless, like I said. Also lily-livered. Also a bunch of other synonyms for "gutless."

But, hey. Gotta keep that propaganda train rollin', right? And it's not like Roger the Dodger isn't following the lead of folks who are well-versed in shaping their narrative.

I mean, why do you think Russian despot/journalist silencer Vladimir Putin invited  apple-polishing dweeb Tucker Carlson to Moscow for a sitdown? It's because the Tuckster is Putin's favorite American journalist -- which is to say, not a journalist at all, but a crackerjack propagandist.

"I gotta find me one of them guys," you can imagine Roger saying.

Odds are he'll have his pick today.