Quick! Somebody sew that glove to his mouth!
As a Red Sox fan I have immense respect for Curt Schilling as a pitcher and what he did for the team between 2004 and 2007. His performance in Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS was legendary, whether that was real blood on his sock or not.
But Curt Schilling is also the biggest blowhard ever to come out of the sports world, which is saying a lot. Now retired, Schilling has a blog (which I won’t bother linking) where he pops off about everything from baseball to climate change to health care reform. He is unabashedly conservative. In 2004 Schilling campaigned for fellow born-again Christian George W. Bush. I think no further comment on that is necessary.
Schilling has written posts opposing the Democrats’ proposed health care reform legislation (as have I, but for completely different reasons). Something about costs. I’m not sure. The man isn’t worth quoting, but perhaps we should take a moment to ask, Where does Curt Schilling get off pontificating about health care reform? Excuse me, but this guy has lived most of his life in a fucking fantasyland where over the course of his career he’s been paid a grand total of at least $114 million to play baseball, which to remind you, is a game. This figure includes the $8 million he collected while he sat on his ass for the entire 2008 season and didn’t throw a single pitch. Eight million dollars for not working. Kind of like a welfare check subsidized by the Fenway fans. You’re welcome, Curt, you great conservative you.
In all seriousness, do you think Curt Schilling ever had to worry about whether his insurance company/team would shell out the money necessary for any surgeries he needed? Of course not. I doubt he even had a co-pay. Schilling, like every other ballplayer, was an investment that needed to be protected. His employers took care of him using money from the working stiff fans who kept showing up at the ballpark forking over their hard earned dollars to watch men play a kid’s game. But in the real, non-fantasy world, people are viewed as expendable by employers and health insurers, and so they have to worry about things—very important things—like whether their bloodsucking HMOs are going to cover the cost of the treatments they need, whether they’re going to get modest raises at work this year, or whether they’ll still even have a job in a month. In the real world, “free agents” don’t have millions of dollars in accumulated salary to fall back on until they sign with another organization.
This is serious stuff. Over 30 million Americans don’t have health insurance. Tens of millions more are getting crushed by annual premium hikes in excess of 10%. In 2009 one in eight Americans used food stamps. People are still getting their homes foreclosed on, and too many people are still out of work.
But it’s all right because millionaire Curt Schilling is posting away on his blog telling us how we can get things back on track. And even though he supported George W. Bush who turned a surplus into a $5 trillion dollar deficit through corporate welfare and military wet dreams with the help of a Republican-controlled Congress, Schilling assures us that what we need is more Republicans. That’s why he endorsed Scott Brown for Senate, a man who said he’ll be “an independent voice” for
The sad thing is that it didn’t have to be this way. Schilling had Major League stints in
- Max
Curt Schilling is a joke!
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