On Colin Kaepernick's sit-outs

Power Line Blog  "News out of the sports world is that no NFL teams want to sign free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick, not merely because he may be washed up, but because of his political stunts. An unnamed NFL insider told Bleacher Report:

“[Many teams] genuinely hate him and can’t stand what he did (kneeling for the national anthem). They want nothing to do with him. They won’t move on. They think showing no interest is a form of punishment. I think some teams also want to use Kaepernick as a cautionary tale to stop other players in the future from doing what he did.”

When I spoke to a handful of executives at the combine a few weeks ago, one even called him “an embarrassment to football.”

"This brings to mind a short passage from a certain recent book that every Power Line reader should have by now (hint, hint, for the laggards) that reflects on this scene:

The shame of protesting athletes is that they are unable to make out a parallel between the exertions necessary for excellence on the playing field that commands the loyalty of sports fans and the exertions necessary for excellence in a nation that commands the loyalty of citizens. Game plans, like constitutions, are not self-executing. Walter Berns put the problem this way:

A regime to which a good man can freely give his loyalty does not come about accidentally, it does not just grow through the passage of time; in addition to good fortune, it requires the conscious and intelligent effort of men who are aware of the goal and of the difficulties to be overcome before the goal can be achieved or approximated.

About the professional athletes disdaining the nation, Harry Jaffa would point again to the example of boxer Joe Louis. Louis once answered the question of why he was willing to fight for a country that treated blacks so badly: “There ain’t nothing wrong with this country that Hitler can fix.”

"And there ain’t nothing wrong with the country that Colin Kaepernick (and his imitators) are doing anything to fix either."

Colin Kaepernick and the consequences of liberal orthodoxy  . . . "Let me suggest that there's a specific type of liberal who never really makes big decisions.  Such people are so locked into a rigid orthodoxy that they simply follow its dictates without considering alternatives or consequences.  This is the ultimate risk-adverse behavior.  It is carried to its logical extreme in the safe-space trigger-warning world of American universities, where there is an intentional insulation from consequences and protection from alternatives.  It becomes quite natural for people schooled in this environment to believe that anyone anywhere who follows the liberal rules should enjoy the same dispensations.  If one follows the rules, good things should just happen.  Kaepernick was just following the liberal rules, so he should not be judged. " . . .