Myopia in action
New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick grew up at the U.S. Naval Academy, where his father was an assistant coach and scout for decades. Now, if Belichick were to run some kind of spy program, which he should and hopefully does, don’t you think he’d be more likely to model it after GRU, KGB, Mossad, Stasi or some other top notch intelligence service rather than President Richard Nixon’s Mickey Mouse operation? Yet one constantly runs into comparisons between Spygate and Watergate, and Belichick has frequently been described as some semi-deranged, paranoid, and, as they say, Nixonian character.
A proper comparison would be “Macaca,” the devastatingly effective video that a Democratic operative shot of a Republican candidate in Virginia last year, with the only difference that the NFL prohibits doing the kind of video taping Belichick did, presumably to offer the League’s dimmer bulbs - Edwards, Turner, Childress -some protection from the added pressure of having to code signals. But I guess if one has one’s head up one’s Beltway then everything is Watergate and “Nixonian.”
