Safeguard That Image!

I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh. He and similar merchants of the All-Heat-No-Light Brigade rarely help me learn anything I couldn't learn in a calmer, civilized and probably more even-handed format from researching and reading about an issue myself.

But if, as a rich guy from Missouri, he wants to spend some of his money to help buy one of the state's two NFL football teams and keep it in his home state, he ought to have the chance. Even if the team in question hasn't enough Missouri history to get a driver's license there, so what?

Apparently my view is not shared by some of the ownership folks and poo-bahs of the NFL itself. Because Limbaugh is controversial and because the NFL has so little confidence in its product that it feels any controversy will drive people away, it didn't like the idea of Limbaugh having any stake in the partnership that was looking to buy the Rams. Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee hung up her cell phone long enough to use her access to the floor of the United States House of Representatives -- a body that has a couple other things on its plate these days -- to tell a group of private citizens whom she does not represent not to do business with another private citizen whom she does not represent.

Part of the furor over Limbaugh involves quotes he's supposed to have said about black people. No transcript or recording for several of these has ever surfaced, and Limbaugh himself denies making the statements. Some, like his observations that people sometimes rate Donovan McNabb more highly than they ought because they want a black quarterback to succeed, he did say. Even if he's proven wrong on the others, it blows my mind that the National Football League -- currently the employer of one Michael Dwayne Vick, among others -- can with anything like a straight face say that Limbaugh is too "insensitive" to be an NFL owner, according to NFL owner Jim Irsay.

Now the league is concerned about insensitivity? A league that employs dozens of drunk drivers, girlfriend/wife abusers, barroom brawlers and drug users? The majority of the guys who play professional football are good men who use their fame and fortune to benefit their communities and families, either quietly or publicly. But the sludge element remains, here and there suspended or fined a little, but kept on and celebrated for as long as they can play and their incidents overlooked, paid off or dealt with in some other sweep-em-up fashion.

I personally think Limbaugh, a purveyor of bombast, bluster and blather, and the NFL, a purveyor of parity, pablum and a peculiar prudishness, are made for each other. But even if they're not, I believe the National Football League is about to learn the painful lesson of how foolish it is to tick off a guy who's got the ear of some 20 million people every week, a substantial sense of his own importance and a whole lot of money he can spend on convincing others of that importance through legal means.