Pro-Obama jock hypocrisy watch

By Rick Morris

All throughout the recent presidential election, many pro athletes, joining their fellow "intellectuals" from Hollywood, decided to use their positions of celebrity to endorse fellow celebrity Barack Obama for president. To a man, they piously intoned that they were prepared to pay higher taxes so that America might be saved by the man promising "hope" and "change."

Guess what? The jocks are now looking for loopholes!

While Obama has moved off of a tax hike on the highest bracket -- for right now -- the efforts of weasel player agents to get around a future tax increase bear notice. The top bracket covers almost all of this country's job creators, productive businessmen who keep our economy humming and (hopefully) growing. They are the high-income folks who give. Athletes? By and large, they're the high-income folks who take. Aside from those who become businessmen like Magic Johnson (whose politics I don't much like, but whose entrepreneurial drive, courage in the face of his illness and peerless on-court skills I do admire), their only contribution to society comes in the trickle-down form of putting their consumption dollars back into the economy.

While willfully handcuffing their productive, job-creating peers in the same tax bracket with confiscatory tax rates, the "Jocks for Obama" are clearly prepared to deploy their scheming functionaries to evade the very consequences they promised to embrace. In so doing, they're indicating that the average jock is not so much different from the trust-fund wasteoid who spends his days getting blitzed down at the 19th hole at the country club.

I can promise you that as we find concrete examples of athletes who advocated for Obama but are trying to get around future tax hikes, we'll write about them here. By the way, here's a free tip to your average jock: strip club "tips" aren't tax-deductible!