The Detroit Distraction

We can already tell that it's shaping up to be a slow news week, because after all, it's Thanksgiving in the USA, therefore there will be no world news. Which brings us to a smaller point. We had thought about posting on the big sporting news in the USA -- the fan-player brawl during a basketball game in Detroit last week and the resulting severe suspensions which fell mostly on the visiting team's players (the Indiana Pacers). However, at the current rate of bloviating about this incident, there's really not that much original to say.

We are mainly struck by the divergence between how the incident would have been handled in European soccer versus the US National Basketball Association, an issue brought up by a Swedish reporter at NBA Commissioner David Stern's news conference on Sunday. In particular, under the European rules, the home team is responsible for the behaviour of the fans, in which case Detroit would have been looking at massive fines and future sanctions (e.g. being forced to play a number of games in an empty arena, or on the road).

So while the player suspensions roughly correspond to similar incidents in Europe (Eric Cantona's lunge at a fan in 1995 being the prime example), there is not a hint of this principle being applied in this case, although the players' association will doubtless argue for it in their appeals of the suspensions.

But our broader point is that for anyone looking for a case study of how the Iraq war has just completely dropped off the radar screen in US domestic politics, the last week is it. The week began last Monday with a controversy about a dropped towel during a pre-game skit on Monday Night Football, drawing the predictable consternation from Colin Powell's son. That was enough to keep the pot boiling till the Friday night mayhem, and (based on our cable news monitoring this evening), the political pundits are having to wait in line behind the sports reporters to get booked on the evening shows.

The upside of this is that we get talking heads who actually, like, know their stuff, but the downside is another week where the chaos in Iraq is relegated to 15 minutes into the newscast. We're not (yet) conspiratorial enough to think that Karl Rove is involved. But he must be happy with the outcome.