Clippers vs. Kings

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Sterling’s case is straight out of Orwell. Owners of franchises are required to sign a series of moral and ethics contracts that bar them from expressing views that are considered detrimental to the league. A past female owner of a baseball team, now deceased, had to eventually sell her minority shares after she said that Hitler was a good job creator in a press conference. (The trouble is that Hitler did create jobs, and lots of them.) She was suspended for a year, then repeated her remarks and was suspended for a longer period and eventually she sold her shares of her own free will. But Sterling did not make his remarks in public, and he is totally within his rights to say that he doesn’t like a female friend bringing blacks to his owner’s box. The real reason the commissioner of the NBA has come down on him with a death sentence is money. Blacks are disproportionally represented in pro basketball games, in the stands and on the court. Throw the bum to the wolves and keep the suckers coming, is the commish’s train of thought.

Two things have shocked me, being a very sensitive soul in the prime of youth: That not a single black player has come out and said that Sterling is within his rights to say what he wants if America is as free a country as it claims to be, and that not a single columnist or pundit has done so either. It’s knee-jerk hysteria and PC gone crazy. Here you have a professional basketball league that along with pro football has been overwhelmed by criminality among the more than three quarters of its players who are black, but the book is thrown at a very rich and rather unpleasant slob for remarks made in private. In Los Angeles, the very city in which Donald Sterling committed the crime of the century, roughly 90 percent of violent crimes are committed by blacks and Hispanics. Almost three times as many black teenage girls as whites become pregnant, and less than half of black American men graduate from high school. One in three black men ends up in prison. I list these horror statistics to show that although the Civil Rights act was passed 50 years ago, the politicians and the media have chosen to look the other way and not read the riot act to black leaders. The contemptible sycophants that call themselves pundits in Washington and New York fell over themselves with verbal inflation to crucify Donald Sterling in case some race hustler targeted them for having remained silent. Courage is an alien word in politics and the media today, especially when it comes to race.