You won’t catch me agreeing with Keith Olbermann often, if ever again. But on the Ray Rice/Baltimore Ravens/NFL domestic abuse scandal he is absolutely right — heads have to roll. And the first to roll should be NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Olbermann, in an excellent monolog, blasted the NFL, the New Jersey prosecutor’s office, the Ravens, and Rice.
It’s worth watching, even if you can’t stand him.
The NFL and the Ravens have both claimed to have not seen the video of Ray Rice knocking his then fiancé unconscious in an elevator in Atlantic City before yesterday. Considering the assets available and the power of the NFL, that’s doubtful.
But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and agree they didn’t see the brutal video until yesterday, and that brutality necessitated their second wave of punishments. What did they expect it to look like? What did they think a 220+ pound man with three-percent body fat hitting a woman looked like?
Roger Goodell, even if he hadn’t seen the video before, clearly didn’t bother to investigate, or even think seriously about, what domestic violence really is. The video showed just how disgusting and brutal it is, but he shouldn’t have needed the video to know that.
That Goodell did shows just how un-seriously he took the charges against Rice and the concept before him. For that lack of seriousness, and his failures during and after this incident, I restate what I said yesterday — Roger Goodell has to go.
The NFL already has a qualified and dedicated replacement waiting in the wings — Condoleezza Rice. Think I’m crazy? Even Jonathan Capehart at the Washington Post thinks this is a good idea. Who says bi-partisanship is dead?