A player-hater

New York Times cultural columnist Frank Rich appears in print in the Sunday paper but the web version is already up. It's another go-round at the hyprocrisy that bedevils controversies about indecency on television, although as Daily Howler has been pointing out, those analysts at the vanguard of the hypocrisy counter-attack are often relying on dubious generalisations about what else Outraged in Peoria does with their time. However, Rich seems to sign on to an extremely negative generalisation about one particular group -- professional football players:

Again as in the [Janet] Jackson case, we are also asked to believe that pro football is what Pat Buchanan calls "the family entertainment, the family sports show" rather than what it actually is: a Boschian jamboree of bumping-and-grinding cheerleaders, erectile-dysfunction pageantry and, as Don Imus [NYC radio yeller] puts it, "wife-beating drug addicts slamming the hell out of each other" on the field.

There's no other way to read that sentence than the claim that the typical NFL player is a wife beating drug addict. Is that really what he thinks? We await the reaction to the sentence, although perhaps it will slip by in the holiday weekend haze.

UPDATE [Nov 29]: Daily Howler, already linked to above with reference to an earlier stage of the dropped towel controversy, today documents further problems with Rich's logic (scroll down past his homage to a fine Irish film).