Last night, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) got cottonmouthed, wiped and licked his lips and finally interrupted his delivery of the GOP response to the State of the Union to bend over and drink some water. By now, you've read someone explaining why this proves Rubio is not presidential material. Or is. Whatever.

Rubio looked goofy. It was funny. Looking goofy isn't really a big deal, though. Liberals spent the last decade cheering the elfin Dennis Kucinich, while conservatives embraced Texas patriot-leprechaun Ron Paul. The goofiest-looking motherfucker in American history was Abraham Lincoln. The guy was made out of seven feet of beard, bones, and hat blocking. Goofiness is a small hurdle for people with ideas. Rubio's speech proved that he doesn't have any.

This was supposed to be Rubio's coming out party. Beltway handicapping figures that Rubio stands a good shot in 2016, so this was a moment for him to evoke big ideas and inspire feelings. He was potentially enough of a savior for the Republican Party that he felt compelled to deny it:

There is only one savior, and it is not me. #Jesus

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 7, 2013

Two more denials and he could worry less about the Jesus comparisons and more about Caesar.

Rubio needed this speech to live up to the story spun about him, but the "chosen one" narrative has always obscured a weird story. Rubio's ascent to the Senate wasn't so much a matter of destiny as it was a series of lucky breaks. He won in a year of depressed voter turnout. He faced a Democratic opponent, Kendrick Meek, who was, at best, probably the fourth choice of the state Democratic Party (after Alex Sink, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and a handful of third-stringers). Then there was the independent candidate, Charlie Crist, who bowed out of the GOP primary after Rubio posed a strong challenge.

Crist kneecapped himself among Republicans by supporting Obama's 2009 stimulus bill at the moment Florida most needed it but also at the moment that paranoia about Obama was at its zenith. For whatever reason—that he's black, a Democrat, a Yankee—Obama was anathema, and Crist did a deal with him. It didn't matter that Crist was still the state's chief executive and that Obama was someone sitting in Washington. Florida's current governor spent more time running for the office in 2010 against Obama than against Democratic candidate Alex Sink. It didn't matter that it didn't make sense.

Into this mess strode Rubio, first as Crist's primary opponent and then as the GOP nominee. And from the moment it was officially a three-way race between Crist, Rubio, and Meek, plenty of Florida wonks assumed Crist was doomed. Lefties stung by Crist's crippling property tax cuts (Florida has no income tax) bore him no love, and the deal with Obama was a final shove rightward for conservatives. The Tea Party gathered around Rubio, and he was only too happy to smile and pretend to not be scared shitless by people carrying around papier-mâché TREES OF LIBERTY soaked with the POSTER PAINT OF TYRANTS.

Rubio got lucky in other ways. Despite being Speaker of the Florida House when it was among the most corrupt state governments in America, despite thousands of dollars of potentially misused campaign funds being paid out to his family, despite abusing state GOP credit cards, despite being best buddies with a man accused of bribery and misuse of funds, and despite being the sort of "fiscal restraint" wizard who defaulted on a mortgage during the campaign, nothing touched him. No one was paying attention to Kendrick Meek, and the corruption investigation into former Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer overshadowed any interest in Rubio's potential sins with its "Borgia popes" levels of excess. (The Greer saga was still going on as of Tuesday.)

So when Rubio's speech started to falter last night, it was easy for people who follow Florida politics to shrug and say, "What did you expect?" The destiny storyline was always bullshit. Rubio is a career hack who won a deeply paranoid election against two guys who couldn't win, in a state so fucked up that almost no sub-Greer level of venality would be broadly objectionable. And after you strip away the investigations, there's not much left to the man. Rubio's always been described as a kind of visionary or idealist about the party, someone who gets a lumpy throat thinking about America. You can even read a book he wrote sort of on the subject, 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida's Future, which he crowdsourced by conducting town halls ("Idearaisers") around the state. It's atrocious, but more to the point, it's a huge collection of generic GOP boilerplate, vague aspirations, and piddly shit. State budget amendments and energy-based tax incentives! Florida should have, like, a really good university! Let's make it hard for sex offenders to nab kids on MySpace!

All that visionary stuff thrown his way mostly boils down to his way of sounding deeply moved when saying keywords like "freedom" and "America." You saw it last night, where Rubio almost instantly came out of the gate with glistening eyes, already overwhelmed. If you ever saw a Prose Interpretation in a high school forensics tournament, you know exactly what it sounds like: that one girl who always put on a southern accent and read that story about speaking to the flowers like they were her dead daddy and asking, "D'yuh still luv me daddeh? D'yuh still luv Amerca? Sing to me, daddeh, through thuh peregrinatin' cry of that Cooper's Hawk."

It went on in this leadenly tacky way for 2,600 words. Rubio opened by tying the desire of the impoverished to immigrate to America with anti-abortion sentiment, claiming that "America is exceptional because we believe that every life, at every stage, is precious, and that everyone everywhere has a God-given right to go as far as their talents and hard work will take them." America is different from another nations, because our economic engine is driven by creating opportunity every time we de-fund access to birth control.

Most of it could have been 2012 campaign boilerplate. We must lower the farcically loophole-ridden corporate tax rate. Obama hates rich people, and taxing rich people will hurt the middle class more than cutting middle-class services and raising middle-class taxes would, so let's do that instead. Obamacare kills businesses. Obama will destroy Medicare and Social Security. All this could have come from Googling anything Paul Ryan has said in the last nine months. Rubio claimed that Obama "believes [free enterprise is] the cause of our problems," the sort of reductively hacky portrayal of Obama's attitude toward the 2007-8 financial crisis that Ryan was selling. America needs middle class jobs but not regulation, despite the fact that working in regulation is a solidly middle class job. In fact, a great deal of government work is. These are phantom jobs. They don't count, because Marcopaul Ryanubio looked sternly at them and said, "Nuh-uh."

But the real money shot of the night—aside from that silliness about a water bottle—was Rubio declaring, "More government isn't going to help you get ahead. It's going to hold you back. More government isn't going to create more opportunities. It's going to limit them." Minutes later Rubio sang the praises of the federal financial aid that sent him to college, and the Medicare that "provided [his] father the care he needed to battle cancer and ultimately die with dignity. And it pays for the care [his] mother receives now." Okay!

The bottled water moment offered the D.C. commentariat the worst kind of low-hanging fruit, yielding a ton of easy jokes and no actual thinking. "GAFFE BAD," screamed Beltway Twitter, before stalking off on the unbent Frankenstein legs of a creature that just took a lightning bolt to the head. For a political class demanding substance instead of shallow observation, it giddily embraced the latter, even nonsensically. Leaving aside that this was Rubio's big test, his big moment, the unofficial kickoff to his 2016, the man got cottonmouth—big deal. If you insist on hammering him on the basis of "optics," maybe focus on the fact that he spent 10 minutes reading a recycled 2012 Paul Ryan stump speech while threatening to weep at America until it rescued itself.

[Source image via Getty]

If you're looking for a takeaway from White House Counterterrorism Advisor John Brennan's testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, all you need is a line from Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who wanted to assure Brennan that he would keep questions short.

"I noticed you're on your fourth glass of water," Burr said, "and I don't want to be accused of waterboarding you." Plenty of people on the august panel of senators laughed at that one, because war crimes are funny.

Going into the hearings, one could hope things would be different. On Monday and Tuesday, voices on both sides reacted with disgust at a 16-page memo on White House drone policy and targeting Americans for strikes. Attitudes were shaken up and responses fresh. Rather than gin up culture war nonsense, the right-wing site Newsbusters raked MSNBC host Touré over the coals for being insufficiently committed to protecting civil liberties from a zealous executive branch.

The Obama administration reacted to the outcry by agreeing to provide the committee with copies of their full legal justification for the drone program, from which the 16-page précis was drawn. By yesterday, though, those full papers still hadn't arrived. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) both seemed upset. Other senators mentioned it, but it wasn't pressing. This is Need-To-Know-Eventually stuff; after a couple years, why rush it?

The centerpiece of the afternoon's pitiable exercise was a kangaroo court held between Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Brennan. Her questions weren't just slow-pitch softball; it was as if someone tweaked the settings on the pitching machine to "Half-Blind One-Armed Opponent Taking Their First Cuts Minutes After Learning of the Existence of Softball as a Game."

Feinstein was downright plummy. Was it not true that Anwar al-Awlaki was a very bad man, Mr. Brennan? And Mr. Brennan said yes. Was it not true that you had proof of al-Awlaki's involvement with many very bad things? And Mr. Brennan said yes. They both saw the necessity of what was done, and it was good.

Feinstein's exercise omitted a central conceit of the rule of law: If convicting al-Awlaki was so easy, it presumably would have been just as easy before his assassination. The U.S. had roughly a year to conduct a show trial between the time they defined al-Awlaki as an existential threat and the time they killed him. The facile ease with which Feinstein promulgated this legalistic sleight-of-hand only highlighted the craven reasons for doing so.

These guys expected you not to give a shit. Drones are bad news, and they shock people, but after a while, if ugliness becomes the background hum of the everyday, eventually you'll tune it out. Like The Onion gag, they expect "outrage fatigue" to grind you down. They expected you to tune it out. Then they whacked an American, and you got mad! Hence the mock trial: See, they totally could have done this all along, which makes everything seem legal all along.

Then again, Brennan also made a point that these targeted killings were legal only because they prevent imminent threats to the United States, as opposed to being retributive sentences carried out for existing crimes. This made the Awlaki klatsch with Feinstein even more of a Kafkaesque absurdity. After calmly engaging in the post facto conviction of a man they'd already killed, Brennan proudly stated that drone assassinations target what you might as well call Futurecrime—the proof of which he theoretically could show the committee, maybe. Brennan spends his off hours floating naked in water, in a bald cap, waiting for Tom Cruise to show up to hear him predict the transgressions of tomorrow. Unless his agent at 1600 Penn authorizes it, he's only talking to Cruise.

Things didn't stop being weird there. Levin repeatedly tried to get Brennan to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture, to which Brennan stubbornly and conveniently repeatedly replied, "I am not a lawyer." I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure you don't need Learned Hand sitting around to figure out it hurts like hell to tear someone's fingernails out. It's a wonder Brennan didn't object to classifying torture as such because he's not also a doctor, lexicographer, or philosopher. How can we ever know anything, man? What if what you think is torture is what I call the color blue?

The Republicans had almost nowhere to go. They like Obama's expanded drone theater of war because he gives bipartisan cover for the Bush administration. Obama lets them say they were right all along. Let Democrats like Levin keep talking about torture; it seems almost trite when the president says he can kill Americans via pen stroke.

As the tough-on-terror party, they could only try to paint Brennan as a loose-lipped security threat, who may have known about dangerous administration statements about the raid on Bin Laden's compound or who might have illegally leaked facts to the press himself. Here was a huge target—the water carrier for a policy of killing over 4,700 people globally, in areas where America is not at war, including some people who are Americans—and the right didn't even try to touch him.

If you expected better from the "liberal" media, you didn't get it. On Hardball, guest host Michael Smerconish said, "The jury's still out with harsh interrogation methods, but drone strikes work." It's an apples-and-oranges statement so reliant on begged questions that it could be a midterm exam on logical fallacy. Drone strikes do work at the opposite of what interrogation seeks to provide, but whatever.

Later, Rachel Maddow painted the hearings as an all-out critique from all the Democrats, when Feinstein alone undermines the assertion. MSNBC even aired clips of Jay Rockefeller's endless dilation, supposedly as an example of hard questioning, in which he prefaced his questions with two or three minutes of dependent clauses before getting lost. At one point he—the great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller—went on pityingly about the sacrifices of life in public service. (Blast the public's hide to Hades. Now he'll never be able to enjoy that ivory back scratcher!) If this was a big attack, it sounded a lot like a few pages of Bismarck sentences with the verbs lopped off the ends.

Pity the heavy heads of the wealthy and unaccountably powerful. Project justifications for your actions forward and backward in time, while denying either end as your intended destination. Hear a joke about torture, pause for laughter. After three hours it was hard not to get the sense that this was a giant Voight-Kampff Test that everyone but Wyden and Levin failed.

Image by Jim Cooke

Last night, NBC news broke the story of an Obama Justice Department memo on extrajudicial assassination of American citizens that screams off the page with the self-delusion and pity of an abused child writing a fairytale. It is a story of calmly supervised adult violence buried under the story-time adventure of so many princes, swords nominally at their sides, who keep hitting and hitting, because they have to.

This compensatory fantasy is the only way a Constitutional Law professor like Barack Obama can face his reflection in the camera lens. It's a story of hunches and God-given visions verbally tortured and parsed into "science," like a square hammered into a circle. It's a tale of an American hero spraying Terror Windex on the smudged screen of a threat matrix, mumbling to himself in the ObamaSpeak of Terror Tuesdays and disposition matrices.

The part of the fairy tale where one says, "And then a wizard fixed everything," has been replaced with its legal equivalent, the blackwhite Orwellian cant of calibrated pseudoscience, the probity of the imperium and an infinity of reason. The story of how Barack Obama kills Americans ventures both high and low for its rationalizations of untruth, even as its secret—that man is matter—spills across the floor at potentially any point on earth.

As Gawker's Taylor Berman noted last night, the memo expands on comments made by Attorney General Eric Holder and by Obama's Counterterorrism Adviser John Brennan. As of yesterday, Brennan was expected to sail through Senate confirmation as the next Director of the CIA, home of American assassination and, now, its own drone force.

Brennan originally spoke of an "inherent right to self-defense," while Holder stated that kill orders would be limited to deterrence of the "imminent threat of violent attack." This new memo makes those terms vague to the point of uselessness as law, and to the point of great utility if you merely desire the thinnest veneer of it. The memo's definition of an imminent threat revises the meaning of those words sharply downward, stating,

The condition that an operational leader present an 'imminent' threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.

Now, a terrorist is someone who "recently" participated in threatening "activities"—the parameters of those words are undefined—then failed to noticeably renounce them. The establishment of what is recent, an activity and a threat will be determined by an "informed, high-level" official, with the definitions of that also left blank. Further, the determination of whether to abandon the obligation to capture and try said American citizen—i.e. the clumsy trappings of constitutionally guaranteed due process—hinges on whether it poses "undue risk" to U.S. personnel and "unfeasability."

This is a stupid idea that tries very hard not to sound stupid by being translated into the creole dialect of Concerned Legalese and Passive Voice. Even before these recent expanded definitions, listening to Eric Holder try to describe the administration's criteria is simultaneously terrifying and hilarious—a man tiptoeing around the pitfalls of signifying nouns and emphatic verbs as if conscious of what future questions he might be asked in a War Crimes deposition. In language so boldly obfuscatory, you could describe going to the toilet in such a way as to remove all bodily functions. You can instantly imagine Holder going through this process:

Periodically, in the course of normative operations, it becomes not only a necessity but an inevitability that, via one of many apertures within a collection of cells, effluvia or energy-production byproducts' expulsion must be effectuated.

And that's how befouling the basic laws of a nation is something people can come to tolerate, even from someone so thoroughly full of shit.

This is the kind of language people like Holder and Brennan must employ, because writing the same policy in plain English reveals a patent and fundamental hideousness. For instance:

We've decided that we will have the right to take your life after a secret and legally unaccountable conclave of vaguely defined experts has decided that you are a member of al-Qaida or a vaguely defined associate group and that you are vaguely senior enough in said organization to be responsible for vaguely defined activities and threats that may be posed at a vaguely defined time, and that attempting to capture and try you is too much of a fucking hassle.

Policies like that are inimical to simple language not just because they are morally repugnant but because four fine examples of simple language can be found in the Fourth Amendment's enumeration of one's protection from unreasonable seizure; the Fifth' Amendment's guarantees to due process; the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of the rights of the accused to public trial; and Article III's enumeration of how we are meant to deal with treason:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Obama tries so hard to couch himself in reason. He and his advisors know that an ugly policy will be more likely tolerated if it seems like everybody put their thinking caps on extra hard when they came up with it. It works even better when the New York Times makes it sound like the people in charge of implementing it will burn their five-o'clock shadow off by rubbing their chins really thoughtfully and going, "Hmmm," after running your name through the reasonably titled Disposition Matrix.

Obama and crew are all making that kind of technocrat wunderkinder mistake that if the person who writes the rules is just smart and thoughtful enough, the rules will become ironclad and binding upon all. And the great ugly irony is that they employ this process to pervert and circumvent a Constitution held up reverently in the American consciousness as the most perspicacious binding document ever crafted by—a room full of technocrats.

They think they can come up with a fairly calibrated set of rules, then pass them on to the next administration and be sure that whomever occupies the Oval Office will play by them with more faith than they paid to the Bill of Rights. This isn't just an Obama problem: it's a bipartisan problem, and a problem that threatens to become permanent now that Democrats have pardoned this policy to support "their" guy. It's a problem that merits a serious discussion on both sides of the aisle, from leftists worried about overreach in war and the same sort of conservative elements who even now see national assault weapons registries as an existential threat to both liberty and life.

But God only knows if we can have that sober discussion. As U.S. Judge Colleen McMahon wrote in response to the ACLU and Times' filing of Freedom of Information Act requests for Justice Department memos on drone strikes on Americans,

I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret [...] The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me.

McMahon was referring to a set of documents whose details have been carefully leaked by the Obama administration, while that same administration officially denied their existence. They have a strategy for defending and selling something that they have tried to claim isn't even there. And, for a thing that isn't even there, its contents provide the fullest argument for not revealing it.

McMahon went on to describe herself as caught in "a veritable Catch-22." The second analogy was much better. In the book from which that expression is taken, the protagonist Yossarian revisits a familiar brothel and finds the old man resident there has been taken away, dead. The place has been destroyed by the boots of the Military Police, and an old woman rocks in a chair in terror, explaining why it happened:

"Catch-22. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Yossarian shouted at her in bewildered, furious protest. "How did you know it was Catch-22? Who the hell told you it was Catch-22? [...] Didn't they show it to you?" Yossarian demanded, stamping about in anger and distress.

"They don't have to show us Catch-22," the old woman answered. "The law says they don't have to."

"What law says they don't have to?"

"Catch-22."

(Just a side thing, I lucked out, in football education. My dad likes football, but he was an impatient dad when it came to explaining things to a young brain that doesn't get grown-up stuff. My mom LOVES football, and she was the one who bought the Oakland Raiders season tickets in the early 70s and sat me down in front of the TV to show me what was happening in games. She's still bitter that Madden was terrified of planes and had ulcers.)

Also, thanks for hipping me to this. I know I shoulda just Wikipedia'd Kramer and checked out his story, but I was trying to take the book on its own terms and think about how it told me what it told me and what it thought was important. Not sure if that's the best idea. Thanks for hipping me to the details.

Spend enough time on sports boards and you start to absorb a multimedia shorthand. Someone asks why Raul Ibañez is a defensive liability, and you automatically post an animated gif of his laser-like throw from the outfield right into the dirt eight feet in front of him. Someone wonders why people dislike Laker fans, and you must choose: The Lakers Bros or, "Lakers .... Llllllllllllakers!"

Or, better yet, a fan screams bloody murder about a bad NFL call that was obviously correct, and some patient soul posts a link to the Amazon page for this: Chris Schenkel's 1964 self-help book, How to Watch Football on Television. You don't even think of it as a book, really; you internalize the reference as a burn and not an object its own. But, between laughing at it for years and the $0.15 price, eventually I thought, "Reading it couldn't hurt, right?"

As we near kickoff for the most-watched football (and most-watched-by-people-who-don't-understand-football) game of the year, I began to wonder if maybe it was still a book that could help everyone.

"I'm Reading Ironically"

Like a lot of people, I've reconciled myself to the idea that not only is much of what we experience crummy but also pitched to us as somehow desirable. Almost every generation of humanity preceding the recent few were worse off than we are, but nobody sold the experience to them. If someone had a megaphone at Depression-era bread lines touting to hungry people the UNIQUE, PERSONALIZED BREAD EXPERIENCE YOU WILL ONLY GET FROM PLUTOBANK'S CHARITY CUSTOMER CARE, America would have been burned to the ground.

If anything, this probably explains the modern tendency to watch white conservative rappers on YouTube or to stay up late on Twitter and watch Strippers vs. Werewolves with a complete stranger just to check its accuracy. (I am an expert in Lycanthropy.) If we accept that much of what we process is bad, there's something empowering about choosing the badness ourselves and watching on our own terms. Plus, sometimes it's transcendent. Like Gymkata.

Which is to say that a book like How to Watch Football on Television instantly seems entertaining far beyond its purported helpfulness. You can just look at the cover and know that, beyond maybe coming away better at diagramming X's and O's, there is going to be some kinda goddamn lunkheadedly Dobie Gillis-levels of earnestness that will either seem funny as hell or beamed from another planet. This is an artifact from an America where people still considered it rude not to take most things seriously. My God.

I Am Trying to Inform Your Heart

At 110 pages of patient explanation, plus glossary and a foreword by Otto Graham, How to Watch Football on Television is predictably earnest from the first page, and it would take a heart of stone to laugh at its good intentions. Within a few pages, any urge to laugh or to treat the book on anything except its own terms disappears.

The dust jacket cover features the New York Giants' offensive line squaring off against the Detroit Lions' defensive line in one of those classic "war in the trenches" moments before the snap. On the bottom right of the hardback cover itself is a blue rectangle, about a quarter the size of the book, shaped like an old television screen. On it, one sees a football player on the ground, one defender tackling another player whose arm is upraised, one man in full-arm extension as if throwing, and another approaching them with arms outstretched. It's football as offertory, the glory of the human form, sacrifice and ecstasy. If it had been printed on any book made in the last 25 years, it would be instantly hilarious. Here, it can't possibly be.

The first chapter, "The Evolution of Today's Football," establishes the terms of the book. Schenkel runs down the development of modern football television contracts, the establishment of a reliable, competitive schedule, the creation of the modern draft, and the televised audience response. He sounds as stunned as anyone that executives paid $22 million to broadcast football games in 1964.

Certainly money figured somewhere in Schenkel's designs in writing the book. He was a play-by-play man for the Giants and only stood to gain from a wider, football-savvier audience. But all self-help books are mercenary at heart. At least this one is correct and written by someone who actually understood how football appears on television. (It could have been written by the mid-1960s equivalent of this guy, for God's sake.) And Schenkel himself seems as happy to be there as anybody. It's impossible not to share a little in the evident pleasure he takes in writing this book, of all possible books.

This is why it still works for a modern audience. Schenkel's tone in describing football is positive and proud, like a dad beaming at seeing his adolescent son growing sophisticated and at ease with the world. It's written without the faux-poetical tones of an NFL Films John Facenda voiceover, before a time when people started sincerely believing the dramatic narration designed to make clip shows seem of epic significance. How to Watch Football on Television makes sense to us because it's written before the era of heroic NFL self-congratulation, self-mythologizing, and over-marketed bullshit that we all learned to stop taking seriously at some point in the last 15 years or so. That serious football is war and war is hell cover photograph and the cover illustration of players in extremis can still speak to a cynical heart because they were created three years before the first Super Bowl and without the finger-on-the-scale marketing significance of 50 years of promotion.

Ye Olde Foot-Ball

Naturally, a lot what makes a guidebook work in 1964 will seem horribly inapt early 50 years later, and Chris Schenkel's football universe appears hopelessly simple by comparison. Unlike baseball, whose gameplay remains essentially unchanged over the same period, Schenkel mentions that players play on offense or defense as a development that some readers might be unaware of.

The rest of the world seems unreal to modern eyes.

On Page 1, Schenkel describes the sybaritic delights of the Yankee Stadium locker room, with each player "assigned to a walk-in stall with enough room not only for clothes and equipment but for all the razor blades, shaving cream, and non-greasy adult stuff he'd care to endorse." On the next page, he effuses, "I'm sure that when the first group of admitted professionals played their inaugural game in 1895, none of them ever imagined that one day players would dress for a game in a locker room with wall-to-wall carpeting." Wall-to-wall carpeting! If Schenkel had gone on to rave about how even second-stringers had access to antibiotics, you'd throw the book at the wall. There is no way that it could be real.

The players themselves are different. Green Bay defensive tackle Dave Hanner "is a soil conservationist in the offseason," Schenkel writes, because of course he is. At least this aspect of the book aged fairly well. In Super Bowl XXIII, after the 49ers' game-winning touchdown, Dick Enberg described the man who caught the ball as, "John Taylor, who sells cars in the offseason for Reggie Jackson." That was January 1989.

Other archaisms are less cultural and financial and more a reflection of the basic structure of football. "Each of the teams in the NFL uses a basic 'T' formation, strong to one side," Schenkel writes, "because it's the the only proved offense that keeps the defense undecided between a pass or a run." Later, he writes: "All plays in the National Football League are designed to be run against a 4-3 defense."

Schenkel writes about flankers, not wide receivers, and he describes the pass-happy Giants offense as a relative novelty. Defense is, by far, the most unfamiliar to the reader. There is no zone blitz. In Schenkel's version of the game, defense is a man-to-man affair, almost wholly governed by which set of individuals is stronger or craftier. What scheming there is amounts to "red-dogging," which is to say, "blitzing." Quarterbacks can overcome the red-dog threat by going to "automatics," i.e. "audibles."

The zone defense itself is such a rarity—still awaiting the AFL style and guys like the Mad Bomber Daryle LaMonica to make them an every-down scheme—that there is exactly one paragraph on "Combating the Zone Defense," 52 pages into the book. Here is all you need to know: "The secret of penetrating a zone defense seems to lie in the ability of the quarterback to call a play which will take a defensive man out of his zone." Thank you, Mr. Buck.

49 Years Is Not So Long Ago

There are other dated aspects of the book that leap off the page, but it seems too easy to impugn it on those points. Yes, there is a casual early-1960s sexism about curvy cheerleaders (multiple mentions) or the fact that your wife will be serving you and your neighbor your favorite snacks at home during the game. Unless you're some kind of crazy social leveler. "You might even permit the presence of your wife and kids," Schenkel says in the closing paragraph, "since they now know all about the game from reading this book." Holy crap, women can read?

But there are many other points of the book that seem familiar. Some of them are fairly obvious. Schenkel describes calling games next to Pat Summerall, and you realize just how long that guy was on television. Product oversaturation is another obvious evergreen, with Schenkel quoting Johnny Unitas's observation that "people are going to get tired of seeing so much pro football on television. Part of the lure has been the fact that it hasn't been easily attainable for the fans." He sounds like every change-resistant grouch who greeted Thursday Night Football and the RedZone Channel. "Maybe so," says Schenkel, in a timeless reply, "but the public right now is demanding it."

Schenkel is also a classic homer, which comes through on the page whenever a Giants player is mentioned. You can tell, because all the adjectives preceding or following the name carry an "-est" suffix. Not being old enough to remember Schenkel on air, I wanted to check to see if perhaps the timing of the book's writing resulted in a lot of praise for contemporary stars from a Giants team packed with them, or if this was just a Schenkel tic. I come from a long line of haters, and when I called family and said, "I am reading a book on football by Chris Schenkel," each one, unprovoked, said, "He's the worst." When I pressed for clarification, I was told, "Oh, call your cousin ___. He hates him more than I do." After getting passed along the hater chain, I was finally furnished with a high falsetto improvised song, whose lyrics were:

O, the Giants!
The Giants!
The Giants!
Frank Gifford!
I love him so much!

There was also a long exchange about Schenkel's broadcast career with PBA Bowling, which was unprintable.

Other through-notes aren't so clear. Referring to Green Bay Packers guard Jerry Kramer, Schenkel writes,

By the time he reached his twenty-seventh birthday last year, Kramer had been hospitalized for a detached retina, an eight-inch wood splinter in his groin, several broken bones and vertebrae, a shotgun injury, and an automobile accident in which the car rolled over his body.

Beyond the butcher's bill aspect of the NFL, a litany of nightmarish physical abuses stretched across the league's existence, there's the subtler matter of noting that football players making bad decisions is fairly timeless. What the hell was Jerry Kramer was doing in the offseason? Every Caste Football yahoo who wants to make a racist point about Plaxico Burress or Donte Stallworth and "NFL thugs" is welcome to riddle out how somebody gets eight inches of wood shoved into his groin, how the shotgun injury happened, how Kramer wound up with the car rolling over him, which event came first, and whether he considered making some personal lifestyle changes.

But the truest statement in the book comes early on. While the animating purpose of the NFL was elided by decades of NFL Films and hacky Grantland Rice-esque melodrama, Schenkel frankly describes the league thus:

Football is big business. For the owners and shareholders, it's another money-making venture. For the coaches and players, it's their way of earning a living. The pro doesn't subject his body to a severe pummeling week after week. [...] in response to the enthusiasm of a dozen curvy cheerleaders and for the glory of the old university. The pro gives the lumps and absorbs the bruises for his own individual paycheck. He fights for his team to win, but he has the necessary resources to promote his own cause as well. [...] The professional football player's desire to win is largely economic.

This was written at a point when the institution of football should have been the most naïve about itself. What's sad is that it grew into its naïvete, nurturing and developing its own poetical credulity even as the product became more sophisticated. If Jon Gruden or Joe Buck or Bob Costas (when he's in his "Hurling Great Thoughts Down From Olympus At You" mode) had to read something so frankly hostile to delusive myth as that passage, they would explode on air. And maybe they should.

Will This Book Help Me Watch Football on Television?

Yes, although to be fair, this book could have been titled, How to Watch Football with Your Eyes and not specified the location or medium. While you will learn nothing of zone blitzes, quarterback reads, and complex scheming—for that, look to Collinsworth, Mayock, or Jaworski—the book is still helpful and accurate in terms of football's rudiments. Plus, the $0.15 price point is still a total bargain.

"Mobutu Sese Seko" is a writer. Know of any other weird old sports books? Drop a line.

Alan Dershowitz, O.J. Simpson's lawyer and a man who spent the middle of the last decade spit-shining the idea of institutionalized American torture, would like us to have a moral debate.

Along with a student group, the Brooklyn College department of political science is co-sponsoring a panel discussion Feb. 7 about Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) of the State of Israel in response to its treatment of Palestinians. This has gotten Dershowitz's attention not simply because he happens to oppose the BDS movement, but for the far more compelling reason that Alan Dershowitz has not personally been invited to participate.

It does seem likely that the panel will end up being a one-sided affair. The two panelists, Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti, may disagree about the scope, implementation, and details of BDS, but they'll doubtless support the idea. To an ardent Zionist like Dershowitz, it would be easy to see the event—even with a Q&A afterward—as less a discussion than a single argument delivered in tandem.

But Dershowitz, as is his wont, takes it about a dozen steps further:

I am not opposed to students sponsoring an event like this... What I'm opposed to is the political department sponsoring and endorsing the BDS. The BDS includes the blacklisting of Jewish professors from Israel, and that's illegal, immoral and racist. An academic department should not be taking sides in this debate.

Also as is his wont, Dershowitz makes his opposition look better through the sheer severity of his own argument. It's precisely because claims like "racist" and "blacklisting" can be casually appended to an event like this that points up the need for clarification. Most people don't know what the BDS is, and it's not something so famous that it had Dennis Boutsikaris portraying versions of it on Law & Order for a couple decades.

Even on its best days, the BDS movement cries out for clarification. Those who support it vary wildly in the degrees of their contributions or endorsement. America's United Methodist Church, for instance, opposes divestment, but affiliates with BDS to support native Palestinian industry and to encourage other countries to block imports of Israeli products made in Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.

Concrete calls for divestment from Israel or boycotts of all products vary in intensity or enforcement. Or they may be suggested but delayed and haltingly implemented. Picture last year's "epic live-tweeting" of a Park Slope co-op meeting, in which hummus had to be reconciled with fascism. (Hummus represents something of a prolonged ache. Solution: make your own damn hummus. It's easy.)

It's not totally clear what Dershowitz means by "blacklisting" of academics, but it seems reasonable to assume he refers to a BDS-related boycott of joint academic projects with Israeli universities. As the linked article notes, such a boycott has direct bearing on the Israel-Palestine conflict, as the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology developed a remote-controlled bulldozer used to level Palestinian homes to remove their tactical roof-having and standing-up abilities.

This topic can have significant nearby impacts for students at a place like Brooklyn College. Technion just won a bid in a joint project with Cornell to build a two-million square foot engineering and applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island. If you're related to Cornell alumni or just happen to visit the neighborhood, you might be concerned that funding close to home might be generating a weapon to be used abroad. It's a sentiment little different from student disgust with MIT during the Vietnam War.

As for Dershowitz's racism charge, well, whatever. Getting called "racist" for advocating a position critical of current Israeli policy is about as difficult as being called a "hipster" for owning an old camera, or a record player, or an oxblood jacket—or, presumably, going to Brooklyn College, even if you skip the panel discussions.

But that does not represent the whole of Dershowitz's objections to the college's lecture/discussion. He goes on:

This department would never invite me, for example, to speak and state my opposing point of view. So it's not about academic freedom; it's about the department taking one side.... The event shouldn't be cancelled, but the political science department should withdraw its support, or alternatively the political science department should invite me or someone else that represents an opposing point of view and give equal endorsement.

As always, Dershowitz has reached some interesting conclusions via the evidence, but perhaps this is the kind of tortured reasoning that occurs when you don't have grad students, interns or (alleged) plagiarism to prepare your remarks for you. It's odd that a politically involved Brooklyn College alumnus would presume he would never be invited by the poli-sci department to address them, despite a relationship with the college cordial enough that he donated his papers to their library.

It's odder still when Brooklyn College associate professor of political science Corey Robin notes that Dershowitz has delivered the college's Konefsky Lecture. It's a lecture decided on and invited by the political science department, which has included multiple political speakers before, and, more to the point, it is offered without counterpoint, entirely alone.

In fact, let's go briefly to another Dershowitz quote, this time from when he was busy elevating his carrying water for legalized torture to something like a Socratic ideal for the future of nations (please note the ironic career summary at the right, in which Dershowitz's torture apologia is glossed with a description of him as, "'the nation's most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer' and one of its 'most distinguished defenders of individual rights,'"):

Torture, like any other topic, deserves a vigorous debate in a democracy such as ours. Even if government officials decline to discuss such issues, academics and advocacy groups have a duty to raise them and submit them to the marketplace of ideas.

Alan Dershowitz is so committed to both an open two-sided dialogue and an open vigorous debate on torture that he gave a 2008 Brooklyn College lecture in which he discussed torture at length. Alone.

The Brooklyn College panel might be great; it might be a fiasco; it might be confused or embrace propositions we think morally wrong. What it's not, right now, is worthy of being tied to big-name, galvanic media-friendly words of outrage like "blackballing" and "racism," while dealing in tropes of academic censorship. But this is par for the course with Dershowitz, the law's most enduring concern troll. Hypocrisy in defense of claiming victimization or demonizing your opponent is no vice. It's not even an effort on par with skipping over a puddle. Dershowitz can worry about one's ability to speak freely before academia after likely burying Norman Finkelstein's academic career. He can publicly hound a respected jurist and UN commissioner until the man writes a bizarre op-ed retraction utterly disavowed by fellow members of his own commission, ignore the contradictions and declare himself on the side of the angels.

Dershowitz is a "teach the controversy" hack indistinguishable from even the poorest mush-mouthed goober running a roadside stucco-frame "Dinosaurs Walking With Man!" exhibit in the North Florida scrub oak. Like evangelicals who want to teach the controversy by forcing creationism into the science classroom while demanding the removal of controversial topics like "some people are literally alive and gay" from health class, his commitment to hearing both points of view depends on whether the point of view being advocated first is his. The Dersh stands alone when invited to campus to descant on the high moral duties of placing electrodes on a Baghdad cabbie's balls, but if Norman Finkelstein is in danger of getting a job somewhere or if the wrong kind of people are talking about Israel back at the ol' college, well, then those people are dangerous.

In the spirit of open debate, we're inviting Alan Dershowitz to participate in the comments.

UPDATE: Alan Dershowitz responds, via email:

I have no interest in responding to an ad hominem attack filled with lies. I am debating this issue on responsible websites such as Huffington Post if your readers are interested in learning what I really think, as distinguished from the distortions contained in your post.

Sent from my iPhone

If you want a clear picture of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Benghazi testimony before Congress last week, skip the full ordeal on C-SPAN and watch the laborious spin attempt in the aftermath. It was a risible experience, born of incoherence and quickly metastasizing into cheap tropes of feminine wiles. Clinton could only have been more treacherous and deadly if she'd walked into the GOP's office and hired it for $25 per day, plus expenses, to find her missing brother.

Something went wrong with whatever passes for conservative policy these days, and the response was a confused flight to the familiar politics of sexual divisiveness. There might have been big ideas lurking around somewhere, but in the fog of war one can always run to a cheap bit of moral clarity: chicks ruin everything, man.

Clinton's grilling was an intellectually null affair, like a bad baccalaureate examination in reverse, in which the grad student is the only one who's done the reading, while the committee uses questions as a crib sheet. One expected someone to begin a question with, "Give me the Cliff's Notes version, if you will, of that whole embassy murder thing."

Half of Clinton's alleged malfeasance could be described as "things Susan Rice did." Rice went on the Sunday chat shows and said that the Benghazi attack was inspired by a repugnant anti-Islam video on the internet. She was wrong, but taking a best guess when people demand answers hardly confirms a malicious intent to deceive—or, supposedly, to downplay terror threats to undercut the Romney campaign. In any case, indignation at being misled is still a bit rich coming from the sorts of humps who backed whatever nonsense Dick Cheney and a circle of organized Pentagon lobbyists said in unison on those same chat shows.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) in particular fulminated against Clinton's failure to call the Benghazi compound and get the "real" story. If Johnson's aim was to suggest a total failure of security on Clinton's part as Secretary, pointing up the devastation would have done him more favors than thinking Benghazi had a coherent ground assessment and communications structure. Being peeved that Hillary Clinton couldn't get on the America blower and tell someone to patch her through to Smokingcrater-4-5789 only downplays the nightmare of violence done to people and the compound. It also omits embarrassing but galvanizing details—like the fact that people at one point were relying on the private internet communications of a Benghazi State Department worker, SomethingAwful.com moderator, and Eve Online player to figure out what happened when.

The bigger mess came from watching security theater and budget theater slamming into each other like two lineman, without anyone bothering to mention that they are on the same team and that you don't beat the opponent by scrimmaging with yourselves at them. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) offered the apotheosis of this, apparently in high dudgeon about neglecting the security of Americans in the State Department despite the fact that he called for its budget to be thoroughly gutted.

(Then Paul wandered on to some conspiracy theory about the Benghazi station being a smokescreen for secret arms shipments to Syria. It's an idea that originated from one of those days where Glenn Beck riddles out the gutless Commie threat to the universe by drawing the General Electric org chart on a chalkboard.)

Paul claimed that this was the worst terrorism act since 9/11, which probably seems a bit much to the families of contractors in Iraq who were beheaded or tortured and had their bodies hung in the street. But his melodrama points to a bigger struggle at the heart of GOP theater: namely, that you can't be the party that claims it can make everyone safe, simultaneously, in every aspect of the Global War on Terror and also be the one that refuses to pay for it. This might be a different discussion if Benghazi were the only embassy to ever worry about adding temporary security, but that's a weekly story at points around the globe.

In the last century's pre-Goldwater era, the Republican Party offered a refreshingly intelligent and cohesive foreign policy attitude. Anti-interventionism staked out a position against imperial executive power derived from a permanent military, while also embracing fiscal responsibility. The ability of a president to intervene whenever and wherever he chooses requires an overweening faith in the wisdom of one man while demanding higher tax rates or lower domestic spending.

That Republican Party didn't attend Clinton's hearings. Faced with a president whose military and foreign policy is basically "his predecessor's but with bigger words"—kill lists, expanded drone strike theaters, sanctions on Iran, a "surge," empty finger-wagging at Israel while maintaining all other forms of support and selling them the bunker-busters that Bush denied them—the GOP foreign policy has devolved into "whatever the opposite of what the president is doing." Sadly, "Nuh-uh," is not a credible counter-argument, but this is how you get people who screamed bloody murder about intervention in Libya now screaming bloody murder that we didn't have more resources there. Or people who spent eight years defending the man who was president on 9/11 likening a death toll roughly 1/750th as large to the carnage of that day.

In the absence of coherence, you attack the messenger. John McCain condemned Clinton's testimony as untruthful (without specificity) and claimed that she was let off the hook because "she obviously has an adoring media. She really didn't answer any questions." This is the same John McCain whose entire kitchen glassware set is 32 Meet the Press coffee mugs.

Oddly it was New York Post's headline that summed up the day's events best, running back to the "Hillary is a bitch" well. This was slightly better than Allen West referring to her being hospitalized for a blood clot in her head as "the Benghazi Flu," but it went hand in hand with Johnson insinuating that Clinton's tears at the beginning of her testimony were rehearsed.

This is how the culture war machine works. When you can't score points or are unsure how to try to, you run back to the zero-sum rhetoric that keeps Rush Limbaugh in smuggled Viagra. You didn't look silly by having your opponent be far better versed in the record than you. You got lied to by a bitch. Bitches lie. Their biggest lie of all is tears. They're the reason our dicks are getting smaller. They're gonna cut your balls off for equality.

The next thing you know, they're going to humiliate you by staring at you when you poop. You will be unmanned by their smoky gaze. They will even endanger the nation. And, let's be honest, this is way more interesting than talking about adequate budgetary resources for global security threats to our diplomatic stations or seamlessly developing combat diversity by focusing on task cohesion over social cohesion.

We don't have to have a thoughtful conversation about Americans in Benghazi or Americans in foxholes, because we can derail that conversation into one about the exploitation of one group of Americans by another. The cliff under men's feet is being steadily eroded by tide of salted Jezebel tears shed in bad faith. From the top down, women are ruining proud traditions, like answering questions of grandstanding party hacks or getting shot to death while shitting into a ditch.

[Image via Getty]

The last time Barack Obama stepped up to an inaugural podium, the notion that we would spend four years with the Senate minority leader pledging not to pass a single item of legislation to help the president, the GOP House holding the American debt rating hostage, and countless party members whispering birther conspiracies and publicly sucking Donald Trump's feathered, blowdried asshole would have sounded like lunacy. Now it sounds like a Thursday.

But as wild-eyed and feverish as the GOP counterattack to the Obama White House has been over the past four years, it doesn't quite match the thud of disappointment that eventually settled into the chests of Obama's most die-hard enthusiasts. Today's celebration will be fun in parts. Barack Obama will give a thoughtful and at times moving speech. There will be young people with ruddy cheeks, excited about politics. There will be bunting. As a party, though, Obama's second inauguration has to contend with forces far stronger than James Taylor's ballads or Obama's command of the moment can equal. Things went haywire. And it's our fault.

In some ways, Obama couldn't help but inflate himself beyond his own capacities or inclinations. In a democracy, a leader must inspire, and Obama possesses a unique ability to do so. But even on the 2008 campaign trail, you could see inspiration beginning to outstrip policy, showing the gaps where less excited voters might have found doubt. The bright ambition of change and hope foundered on his commitment to bipartisanship and compromise. Both were promises he needed to make, in the permanent checklist of presidential campaign rhetoric. But to believe in the sincerity of one—and especially Obama's seeming sincerity—meant knowing the impossibility of the other. You can't pledge daring progressive change to your followers while also telling them that you expect to split the difference with a party who compromises by starting negotiations in place and then moving further rightward. While a first-rate online and fundraising presence got the Obama team the names of seemingly every Democratic and young voter, it was the speeches played and replayed on Youtube and posted to Facebook pages that allowed them to feel a part of something. Telling those voters, "Now settle down," would have blown the illusion.

People needed that illusion. Maybe they needed pageantry and peroration to get past eight years of meathead governance, fear and obfuscation. Maybe they just wanted to see America take great strides away from the political rhetoric of racial division, past the Southern Strategy, Jim Crow, the Confederate States, slavery—every half-assed dehumanizing expediency of nearly two centuries. Maybe they wanted to feel the thrill of their own potential writ large.

They weren't alone. The New Yorker ran cartoons of Obama smoking from a cigarette lighter like FDR, riding around in a 1930s convertible. The people who make animated gifs—whoever they are—went nuts with images of Obama. The term "New Deal" got more workout than in a two-hour bloc of used-car radio spots. Everyone remembered the final week of campaign emotion—Obama's quavering voice about his dead grandmother, the celebration in Chicago—while the policy, the inconsistencies, the sucking vortices of the very permanent Washington, D.C., swamp fell away.

I'm no different. I stood in a bar with scores of drunks as the 2008 election returns came in. People hugged and kissed. I came home and wrote one of the most babblingly effusive and embarrassing things ever, a blog post that shamelessly quoted from speeches from FDR, MLK, JFK—the sorts of speeches I'd occasionally get absolutely shithammered and wind up listening to, on Youtube, whenever Bush's we're gunna fight the tairrists—we're gunna smoke 'em outta their hidey-holes armchair warrior routine made me feel like everything was just going to be mean and dumb from now on.

I knew people who went to the inauguration in D.C., people who texted home excitedly and posted to their Facebook pages. People bought extra copies of the newspaper. I did the same, and now I wonder why. Obama gave a thoughtful speech that I listened to thoughtlessly, listening for things I'd prefer to hear and ignoring the great emotive vacuity lurking behind purple prose, Valley Forge references, nods to "canon" American political text. Then he started governing and lowballed the needed stimulus thanks to an economic policy gang comprised of the same jerkoffs who began to deregulate and break the world under Clinton, and it was time for the same old shit again, bent slightly leftward.

And what a lot we got. Obama campaigned as a constitutional scholar who respected the rule of law and abhorred the Bush administration's secrecy. His contempt resulted in an administration setting the record for prosecuting whistleblowers under the Espionage Act. A sober reassessment of our terror policy saw vastly expanded multinational drone killing via an unaccountable "Kill List" his administration pretended didn't exist.

All of this is worth keeping in mind while Obama issues sociopathically sonorous peace encomia, knowing that even at that moment someone under his command is sky-fragging a dead-end Yemeni shitkicker about as threatening to the Midwest as a mayfly is to a jetliner. The dead guy's brothers and cousins might get mad and pick up a copy of Sayyid Qutb, but, hey, put those fuckers on the list, too. While we wait for things to come in range, we can have a reasonable debate about the vast array of options that the Obama administration has set for the counter-terrorism debate: We can kill them and anyone nearby over there with troops and risk our boys' lives, or we can kill them and anyone nearby over there by remote control.

All of this sucks, of course, but the question to keep in mind is whether any of this is especially Obama's fault. Certainly, he keeps authorizing these policies, but whether it sucks belongs partially to all of us.

If anybody wanted to pay attention, Obama revealed himself on the 2008 trail as a callow thinker on military policy. What sounded moderate and even ponderous did so as counterpoint to an administration of lacrosse bros hurling JDAMs at Baghdad. He was callow on health insurance compared to Clinton and Edwards, and he was callow on economic policy compared to both again. Apart from a break from the policies—read, also, "politicians"—of the past, what sounded wonderful were the outcomes that those policies could engender, given a world fortunate enough to desire them. "Assume we had a can opener."

But between the conception and the creation falls the shadow, and it's four years long. It's filled with racism and paranoia and obdurate Republicans, but it's also filled with the essential character of a man that walks far beneath the cruising altitude of his oratory.

Obama was damned. By his party, by the color of his skin, and by the fugue of madness defining his opposition at this point in history. But he and we are complicit in it. He rhetorically sold high while planning to walk a low and level path, one whose direction could just as well be set by those who wished he'd get lost. He pitched great ambition hand in hand with great reconciliation, despite both, currently, being inimical to each other.

Those two pitches required an audience deaf to their antagonisms, and he got it. That exultant greeting in Washington, on January 20, 2009, was given by people happy to meet a man who never concretely emerged in the campaign but did so instead with the ethereal grace of a movement and the ambition of seeing one made flesh. It celebrated someone not elected and someone who was only there for the day. It celebrated something all those who stood there in victory would have to keep working toward the next day, and the next and the next. Four years later, he will probably show up again, but he won't stay long. Those who would be an instrument for his ideas won't be there tomorrow either.

This has been a fantastic week for media outrage, especially on Twitter. On Monday, a pro-Scientology ad in the Atlantic that was mocked up to faintly resemble an article generated hours of castigating tweets and countless op-eds. Then, last night, Deadspin broke the story of Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te'o and the girlfriend who doesn't exist.

This sort of stuff is fun. It generates great one-liners from Twitter wags, and huffy people are unintentionally funny. But it was also instructive, pointing up great blind spots in journalism and in its own angry self-evaluation. On one hand, there was the easy pose that writers could strike, the lazy and uncritical attitude that fit conveniently into a profitable narrative that benefits themselves and their employers, netting them plaudits. Then there was the Te'o thing.

What happened with Manti Te'o is something anyone can understand. Te'o, a Mormon star linebacker at a religious college had a chaste and emotionally intimate relationship with a girl who survived a car accident, battled leukemia and eventually succumbed to it on the same day that his grandmother died. Among the girlfriend's last words to Te'o were her wishes that he not worry about her funeral and just go out and win! Win, Rocky Manti, win! His team went on to become the #1 ranked in the country, and Te'o came in second in the Heisman trophy race. The Fighting Irish's season only ended in the BCS Championship Game.

This is real storybook stuff. Everything else besides the girlfriend is still true, and it's no wonder journalists pounced on it. For all the words like "craft" and "discovery" and "journey" that emerge from a journalistic salon (read: futon near a hookah), the key word when talking about a journalistic story is story. Even the most affected hacks know this, because they've had the same experiences you've had. They've been at a party and left thinking that a guy telling interesting stories all night was an interesting person. It's easy to confuse a person's quality with the content he shared.

So you can see why Te'o was irresistible. The narrative and the quotes were so good that simply plunking them down chronologically left writers only with the burden of throwing in some noticeable stylistic prose elements before clicking "publish" on something that would do mad Facebook shares and bomb-ass retweet numbers. An average reader who loved the story—and who wouldn't?—would stand a pretty good chance of also thinking, "Hey, that's a great writer." The same goes for pro writers themselves, who are just as susceptible to self-contained feature narratives and the awards they earn.

Still, the Te'o story elicited a lot of voluntary Twitter mea culpas. Here are two, from ESPN's Kevin Van Valkenberg and Sports Illustrated's Tim Layden:

.@kvanvalkenburg We have all written stories like this. Any writer who says otherwise is lying

— Tim Layden (@SITimLayden) January 16, 2013

Their confessions are at once welcome, reasonable and unnecessary. For one thing, Te'o's lie (given details he volunteered about meeting the girl, it's less likely he was duped) is totally ludicrous. Eventually, someone would find out. It's natural even for skeptics like journalists to assume stories like this are true, because the consequences for making them up are so dire, so immediate and so possible. Uncovering the lie is a matter of when, not if. What kind of idiot or madman would tell that lie?

For another thing, at some point we all have to rely on something we heard. We reach a point where it becomes impractical to seek more references for any given act or statement. We surrender, eventually, to authority. When multiple journalistic outlets repeat a story enough times, re-verifying them just to add a few details for that day's edition becomes a costly waste of time. Even if a journalist has doubts, he may not be able to act on them. Editors can often influence coverage of a story like bizarro versions of youth soccer coaches: when seeing all the kids swarming around the ball, he yells at the kids strategically staying in position to go swarm with everyone else. Otherwise they might look stupid.

Given the above, the response to the Te'o story has been refreshing. Deadspin published an excellent rundown of the facts and a solid piece of investigative work, and it was almost immediately met with choruses of "Good Job!" and "We Fucked Up!"

Compare that to the immediate and lingering response to the Atlantic's Scientology ad, and what you see is an attack singling out a journalistic outlet and a specific advertiser, while essentially giving a free pass to far more dire systemic abuses.

The Scientology ad is more properly known as an "advertorial," a fake article or op-ed inserted in the overall document of a website, magazine or newspaper, to make it seem more august and incisive than "MAD DOG MIKE'S MERCURY TOWN CAR TOTAL CARMAGEDDON: UP TO $5000 GUARANTEED TRADE-IN ON HORSES, MOPEDS AND BURROS!!!!"

The advertorial itself was pretty fantastic. It conveyed all the tone-deaf self-congratulation of the worst totalitarian nightmare regimes. Then it was followed by clearly strictly moderated canned "user comments." In fact, just go read it (scroll to the bottom) and then compare it to virtually any press release from KCNA, the Central News Agency of North Korea. The Scientology copy had all the uncritical summarization of a pre-teen's book report, the fawning praise of a tween love letter and the rigidly bright forecast of a Five Year Plan.

Figuring out why journalists pounced on it requires very little effort. One, the advertorial stood merely a few inches behind the line of hilarity on its own and stepped across it a few times. Critics only needed to give it a nudge. Then we would all think, "Hey, those critics are funny."

Two, the Church of Scientology has, in the past, sued journalists, sought to intimidate and frighten them and generally evinces lockstep, cult-like hostility toward any inquiries into its practices. The Tampa Bay Times—formerly the St. Petersburg Times—has published many excellent pieces on the CoS, from the Church's own backyard. (It's headquartered in Clearwater, which is part of the greater Tampa Bay Area.) As a result, the Times has been an intimate witness to the Church's hostility and attempt to influence local government for decades. More importantly, this ad clearly meant to divert the Scientology narrative away from Lawrence Wright's new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief. Combine journalist's sticking up for their own, not wanting to be bullied and wanting to throw the narrative back toward a serious work, and their motives are pretty obvious.

But there's another important explanation: making the discussion about Scientology and a Scientology advertorial—and, in particular, this Scientology advertorial in this magazine, the Atlantic—keeps the discussion from broadly engaging who and what funds current journalism.

Structurally speaking, an advertorial should provoke no shock or disgust. This website—and the suite of Gawker websites—posts sponsored articles clearly marked as sponsored. (Full disclosure: I played the Old Spice video game where Dikembe Mutumbo shot space aliens.) Many news websites you read feature them as well. There are sponsored links in your Facebook feed. If you open almost any newspaper or magazine, you will eventually find an advertisement that's just a tweaked font style or size away from looking identical to a regular article. The New Yorker devotes pages to faux articles about its New York symposia. You know what all these are. Ads appear next to original creative content everywhere. You show up 15 minutes late for movies in the theater. You don't click on the Youtube for AWOLNATION's "Sail" and think, "Huh, I guess when I listened to it on the radio I missed the first 30 seconds that were about how skateboarders need Powerade."

A Scientology advertorial provides a specific non-systemic target. It's easier to rail at it than the ugly funding of a magazine when your magazine might have ugly funding of its own. It also provokes less hand-wringing about whether writers are themselves mouthpieces for specific lobby agendas.

Take the Atlantic. As Alex Pareene notes in his annual Hack List, the Atlantic is run by the brother of a senator and the son of a former CIA spook to produce mainstream beltway bilge for a magazine that is much less lucrative than the "Work Summit" symposia it sponsors. Here's one such "Work Summit," focusing on future jobs and how to train the workforce for them (i.e. how to gut and modify education). Guests included Obama's chief school-privatization pimp Arne Duncan, as well as school reform celebrity Michelle Rhee—the subject of a recent PBS expose about how the revolutionary gains her schools made on the sorts of paid-for standardized tests sold by wealthy private companies might have been the result of cheating.

Also on the guest list was Atlantic's then-columnist Megan McArdle. You might remember her from her recent Daily Beast column in which she said that mass school shootings couldn't be reduced by banning firearms—"slippery slope!" "liberty!"—so it would be best to train kids under ten to just gang-rush the school shooter.

While at the Atlantic, she hand-waved away the value of universal health care and dismissed the factual existence of broad swathes of reality in arguably the worst argument against public health care ever written. Her Atlantic career exhibited the kind of Koch Brothers-trained journalistic insight that leads to independent thoughts supporting whatever the Koch Brothers' opinion might be on any given issue. The S.H.A.M.E. Project profile of her has more.

Needless to say, writers and investment like that are probably not predisposed to big issues devoted to deriding market structures in schooling and shifting the defense budget to the Department of Education. They have powerful incentives to produce analysis concomitant with those who've invested in their careers or their employers. You can find fundamental conflicts like these anywhere.

Slate and the Washington Post are owned by the same same media group that owns Kaplan, Inc., which provides standardized testing materials and college-level diploma mill service. The Huffington Post has an entire sponsored-article section, but they needn't have bothered, because their anti-scientific homeopathic quackery in medical articles has been going on for years and is so religiously stupid that it seems insulting to believe there isn't a profit motive involved. MSNBC, for all the right's derision as a "radical" "liberal" entity is owned by a massive arms contractor, General Electric, and NBC used on-air military analysts who were also being paid by contractors. CNN ran its "hard-hitting" Piers Morgan interview with a BP executive amid a giant BP commercial blitz. Politico openly aims to be read primarily by the Beltway, which is why you will never find an idea there more than radiantly beige.

In this environment, something so stupendously bad as that Scientology advertorial must have been a godsend. Scientology abuses journalists and terrorizes apostates. People who control major revenue streams for newspapers or magazines would never do those things—at least not openly. But that's the thing: journalistic organs don't publish performance reviews or minutes from exit interviews. Scientology stupidly insists on being in-your-face about its strong-arm attitude.

Better still, target-wise, Scientology is a cult! Of course, the substantive difference between a religion and a cult is that the former just has older documentation. It's creepy when Scientology tries to use mass media to tell people do and believe certain things, but it's fine when Ross Douthat uses Catholic dogma in the pages of the New York Times to argue for government's restricting birth control. And Scientology might be a criminal and tax-evading entity, whereas—Crusades, Inquisitions and anti-Semitism aside—the Catholic Church wouldn't dream of any such action or untaxed purpose. Apart from a 30-year international conspiracy to obstruct justice, silence victims, protect rapists and preserve revenue streams from criminal and civil liability.

The point here is not that the Catholic Church and the Church of Scientology are equivalent. Nor is it that private moneyed interests in journalistic organs necessarily have the same predatory interests in message control as Scientology. Those are red herrings. But the Church of Scientology is a bigger one, and by God did it get slapped against a wall as loudly as possible.

Looking at the two crises of journalism that erupted within days of each other, an easy, instant and honest reaction arises from one, while a self-interested and obfuscatory reaction arises from another. Manti Te'o's story duped everyone, and everyone responded accordingly. He got us. We messed up.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic's Scientology advertorial elicited finger-pointing, blame and evasiveness. Media members pointed to a single media and single non-media entity and depicted them as the problem. The Atlantic—and not a systemic dependence on private funding and behind-the-scenes investors—displayed the risks of blurring the boundaries between advertisers and reporting. In a journalistic environment where funding increasingly comes under the umbrella of mass media companies or where individual entities are beholden to the largesse of a few corporations or individuals—or a sponsored article in the sidebar—crying out that everyone else is more diseased or impure than you are just makes you the leper with the most fingers.