Bullshit-Sniffing Media Hounds Finally Bark (Make That Hound, Singular)

The Chronicle’s Lisa Gray had a good---dare we say hard-hitting---follow-up Sunday on the arrest of the 59-year-old art teacher at Roberts Elementary last month after a drug-sniffing dog deployed by the Houston school district purportedly got a whiff of contraband in the woman’s car (a column that presumably led to this news story in Wednesday’s newspaper). A subsequent tossing of the teacher’s vehicle allegedly turned up two entire tablets of Xanax, and she could not produce a prescription for their use. (These pills---what us knowledgeable on-the-street types refer to as “bars”---are about as long as a thumbnail and maybe a fifth as wide.) This major victory in the War on Drugs was attended by a clutch of police patrol cars and at least one helicopter from a local TV news outfit---y’know, the whole Rice University-area neighborhood around Roberts was hoppin’, like the SWAT team had cornered an armed murder suspect in a backyard.

As Gray reported, the woman is a dedicated educator loved by students and parents, and the Roberts community has rallied behind her. From what we understand the teacher in no way appeared impaired in the classroom when the dope hound allegedly sniffed out the non-prescribed pharmaceuticals in her vehicle (while its human handlers up and down the line, from the superintendent and trustees to the cop who held the leash, figuratively relieved themselves all over the 4^th Amendment*) and initially was so unperturbed she was willing just to hand over her keys because she was reluctant to leave the class she was conducting.

Her arrest came as the school district continued its superintendent-ordered “sweep” of unattended vehicles in its campus parking lots, an overwrought reaction to the hysteria over a supposed widespread drug problem among school district employees that was vigorously fanned by the local media (we noticed that Channel 11, our default television news provider, had posted on its Web site an action-packed “raw feed” of the teacher’s departure from the courtroom after her first appearance before a judge last month.) The numbers say otherwise: according to the Chronicle’s count, 15 district employees had been arrested this school year prior to the sweep, and we believe that maybe three have been snagged since. Almost 30,000 people work for the district, more than 12,000 of them teachers. We’re way too high to do the arithmetic, and we never passed a TAKS exam, but we’d wager that the minuscule percentage of employees arrested (never mind actually convicted) is much lower than what would result if, say, one of the local TV stations turned a dope-sniffing dog loose in its employee parking lot.

It’s not like the drug-sniffing dog racket is an infallible science, either. We’d be interested in knowing how many “false positives” the district has notched---that is, when the pooch zeroes in on a vehicle and the owner consents to a search that turns up nothing. We were told of one school where the dog lit on four vehicles. A small amount of marijuana was turned up in one belonging to a staff employee, but nothing was found in the other three. Yet the owners of those vehicles were summoned out of their classes and subjected to unnecessary humiliation, not to mention a few moments of bowel-loosening dread.

Something worse than temporary humiliation hangs over the Roberts teacher, but in most respects she’s luckier than the average district employee who’s been pinched. She’s white (no doubt much to the relief of district higher-ups---no racial profiling by the drug-sniffing dog!) and has a top-notch defense lawyer and the support of an affluent and influential group of parents. In other words, she has the wherewithal to get her story out in the media, and that can't hurt. We’re pretty sure most of these advantages are not available to the kitchen worker at school district headquarters arrested on the first day of the sweep.


*Happens everyday, so who cares, right?

Oh, Man, I Was Sooooo Messed Up …

So it was the drugs, huh? Well, one thing you can say in Chuck Rosenthal’s favor: At least he didn’t roll over on his wife during a nationally televised congressional hearing, or insinuate that a supposed good buddy is so feeble-minded as to have misremembered significant conversations.

Instead he fell back on America’s all-purpose excuse. These, of course, were legal drugs---at least according to the statement by Rosenthal that accompanied his resignation as district attorney---but prescribed and consumed in such a combination as to impair the D.A.’s judgment (or to cause “some impairment,” as he phrased it). Anyway, that’s what he said, and who are we to discount that explanation (for whatever)? After all, you don’t have to be a Scientologist to see that ours is one seriously overmedicated society. It would be one last act of public service by the retired D.A. to publicly specify which drugs combined to loosen his screws, if only to warn other depressed middle-aged males of the dangers of mixing certain medicines.

We must confess to finding it difficult to suppress a latent sympathy for Rosenthal that arose while we watched the news clips of Lloyd* Kelley** and noted theologian and recent Holocaust Museum visitor Quanell X (what a pair!) holding forth on the courthouse steps. One station aired a snatch of Quanell, speaking before it was known that Rosenthal had permanently clocked out, declaring the district attorney to be “the devil himself.” That right there is all anyone needs to know about Quanell: No sooner does he emerge from the Holocaust Museum a "changed man" than he’s back setting the bar for "deviltry" as close to the ground as possible.

*By the way, it’s still unclear to us at this late date what relevance Rosenthal’s email traffic held for the lawsuit Kelley is pressing against the sheriff’s department. We think the answer is “none,” although the lawsuit appears to be meritorious in its claims.
**Check out the way Kelley tosses out for public consumption the rumor that Rosenthal is a boozehound, much the same way he years ago tossed out for public consumption the rumor that Sylvia Garcia was gay. The boy’s a charmer!

Precious Keepsakes of Our Fleeting Time Together

But seriously: What kind of person holds on to bloodied gauze and dirty needles for six or seven years?

An ex-cop, apparently.

We did not know until reading the New York Times this week that Brian McNamee, Roger Clemens’ ex-trainer and chief accuser, was a pre-Giuliani era member of that city’s police force, a resume entry his lawyers have cited to explain his retrieval and storage of items he claims to have use used while injecting Clements in the buttocks with steroids and human growth hormone at the Yankee pitcher’s New York apartment in 2000-01.

In other words, it supposedly was a prescient CYA move by a distrustful onetime law enforcement officer, not a manifestation of some heretofore undefined psychological malady or an effort to cash in on eBay down the road. (And one is moved to wonder whether Clemens, guilty or innocent, was inoculating himself against just such a possibility when he acknowledged early on that McNamee had given him injections in the backside, of Vitamin B12 and painkillers.) According what to an unnamed lawyer “familiar with the matter” told the Times for Thursday’s edition, McNamee says he spirited the detritus away from Clemens’ apartment and took it to “his home in Queens, where he had a medical waste-disposal box.” (Doesn’t everyone?) As to why McNamee only lately has stepped forward with this (alleged) evidence---well, that’s what Clemens gets for taping McNamee’s phone call to him and making it public.

Considering the intimate moments these two shared over the insertions of needles into one man’s tender spot---and we’ll refrain from calling further attention to the homoerotic undertones of those endeavors---theirs does not seem to have been a relationship built on trust.

Now comes word from the New York Daily News that McNamee is purporting to have hit Debbie Clemens with HGH before she posed in a bikini for Sports Illustrated’s 20003 swimsuit issue. (The Daily News did not report whether McNamee claims to have injected Mrs. Clemens in her tush.)

Damn, this is getting good---better than Season 5 of The Wire! And the cast is getting almost as large: According to Friday’s Times, Clemens, in the midst of his two-day meet-and-greet swing through congressmen’s offices on Capitol Hill, was “introduced” at his news conference by none other than "America’s Judge," U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, a onetime colleague of Clemens lawyer Rusty Hardin in the Harris County district attorney’s office (as well as of Chuck Rosenthal, whose would-be destroyer, like Clemens’s, is an ex-cop). We’re sure this wasn’t the first time Poe has given an accused drug user such consideration.

If you, like us, can’t get enough of this tale, we’d recommend this detail-rich profile of McNamee in the recent New York magazine, which includes a description of a 2001 episode that resulted in McNamee being investigated but not prosecuted for a rape involving GHB (said incident allegedly having taken place while McNamee was "partying" at a Tampa hotel with Bellaire High grad Chuck Knoblauch), as well as this observation on the nature of the ex-cop's relationship with The Rocket:

“McNamee got off on being the guy that Clemens deferred to,” says Pat Jordan, a veteran sportswriter who spent time with the two men in 2001. “The ‘greatest pitcher of our generation blah blah blah’ would have to ask McNamee what he could have for dinner, and McNamee got off on it. He was officious about it. He was pissed off I was intruding on their intimacy.”

What We All Knew, and When Did We Know It?

It was unfortunate that on the day the Mitchell Report was issued the Houston Chronicle’s front page bore the headline “Baseball braces for report on use of steroids” adjacent to a large picture of a large man with an unusually large head diving into third base beneath the overline “ASTROS: Club finally gets its man---Miguel Tejada” (a juxtaposition that was somewhat more unfortunate for the Astros than the newspaper). Deeper in the Chronicle it was reported that

Roger Clemens was filming a video for the Web site of the Memorial Hermann Hospital Sports Medicine and Human Performance Institute that carries his name when he learned that the Astros had acquired All-Star shortstop Miguel Tejada from the Baltimore Orioles.

Yes, well, we hope the filming wrapped up early because the report for which baseball was bracing on Thursday morning left the mere concept of a Roger Clemens Institute for Sports Medicine and Human Performance overly fraught with irony (the real funny kind!) by Thursday afternoon. (Allegedly, of course.)

The Mitchell Report’s allegation that Clemens had pumped himself up on something other than 12-oz. rib-eyes from H-E-B quickly supplanted the Pasadena resident’s dispatching by shotgun of the two house burglars as Local Topic of Public Discourse #1. It appears that the notion of The Rocket being hit in the ass with a spoonful of testosterone has robbed Our Town’s dewy-eyed baseball fans and pious sports scribes of the last vestiges of their hard-won innocence.

But we were not surprised, according to Chronicle sports columnist Jerome Solomon, who hastily offered up this considered wisdom:

Roger Clemens? Andy Pettite [sic]?

Yes, it hurts.

We all knew. We all knew. But, still it hurts.

OK, man, here’s a hankie. Compose yourself.

Now explain what you mean by “we all knew” (and was that a cut-and-paste typo or did you mean to repeat “we all knew” intentionally, for, um emphasis?). Is that a far-flung global pronouncement to the effect that “we” “knew” that baseball had a “drug problem” similar to the “drug problem” “besetting” society at-large (that is, “we” take drugs, of all kinds, to make “us” feel better and enhance our human performance; at this very moment, for instance, we [that is, me] are enjoying the tail-end of the performance enhancement provided by the Advil Cold and Sinus pill we swallowed some six hours ago). Oh, the pain!

Or was that a “we all knew” in a more localized sense, as in “we all knew that Clemens and Pettitte were doping themselves but really didn’t know, or pretended not to know,” which gives rise to the question, “Why, then, didn’t you exercise your journalistic duty to tell us?” If that’s indeed the case, than Jerome Solomon should immediately fold up his blog and turn in his membership card to Sigma Delta Chi or whatever professional organizations he belongs to.

But we don’t suspect he “knew.” How could anyone have known about Clemens, a guy who seemed to get bigger and better as he got older (for a while, anyway), contrary to the way most of the rest of humanity has aged for hundreds of thousands of years?*

Personally, we (that is, I) don’t care if Clemens juiced himself. He was an unreconstructed prick before the Mitchell Report was issued and he doubtless will remain one (he’s also a hellacious competitor and one of the two or three best pitchers in baseball history---conditions that are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing). We see that he’s denied the allegations and joined Councilwoman Carol Alvarado on the list of celebrities who’ve hired Rusty Hardin as counsel even though they have been accused of no crime.

So he’s exactly like Barry Bonds, without the indictment---he’s accused but denying or in denial. For some reason, though, we suspect the fans and sportswriters won’t be quite so hard on The Rocket.

* Consider, for example, the decline in the quality of this blog over the years.