Oh, And, Um, Congratulations To Lakers (The Fans Don't Riot-Only Soccer Fans Riot)

A belated congrats to the Lakers and their championship win last week. And, yes, I did watch the game! I used the DVR to record the shows I wanted to watch but had to miss because of the game seven.

Two images from the game: One we like ...

one we don't like ...



Photos from Reuters.


Which brings to mind a comment made at the start of the World Cup from a certain Glenn Beck.

I don't get the baseball thing, but the soccer thing, I hate it so much -- probably because the rest of the world likes it so much, and they riot over it, and they continually try to jam it down our throat." [snip] It doesn't matter how you sell it to us. It doesn't matter how many celebrities you get. It doesn't matter how many bars open early. It doesn't matter how many beer commercials they run. We don't want the World Cup. We don't like the World Cup. We don't like soccer. We want nothing to do with it. You can package it any way -- you can spend all kinds of money. You can force it on our television sets. We will not enjoy the World Cup.

Hmmmm. So soccer fans riot, but true American sports fans don't.

I seem to remember the Republicans hijacking the term "soccer mom" to brand them more representative of "middle America." Now, soccer is a pejorative term used by the Republican right?

The term came into widespread use near the time of the 1996 Republican National Convention. The first use of the term in a news article about that election appeared in the July 21, 1996 edition of The Washington Post. E.J. Dionne, the article's author, quoted Alex Castellanos (at the time a senior media advisor to Bob Dole) suggesting that Bill Clinton was targeting a voting demographic whom Castellanos called the "soccer mom." The soccer mom was described in the article as "the overburdened middle income working mother who ferries her kids from soccer practice to scouts to school." The article suggested that the term soccer mom was a creation of political consultants. Castellanos was later quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying "She's the key swing consumer in the marketplace, and the key swing voter who will decide the election."