See the picture above? It’s the standard picture that happens when someone in America wins one of the four major sports trophies. It’s one of those things that I guess comes with the job of being President. Sure, you get to order the death of terrorists, but you also have to stand close to Boston Bruins head coach Claude Julien and his creepy, egg-shaped body. It’s a tradeoff that may or may not be entirely fair, but still – Obama was elected to make the hard choices.

This fairly innocuous event happened yesterday and it probably wouldn’t have made the news anywhere besides in the Northeast or on hockey blogs across the internet if Boston goalie Tim Thomas hadn’t decided to skip the event to protest the government being too large, or something like that according to his Facebook page.

Because we live in the age of the internet and the twenty-four hour news cycle, where gossip and dumb shit like this becomes news, word spread and now hockey is actually being talked about in America for some other reason than fighting or injuries. Unfortunately it’s for another rather dumb reason.

I’m not writing this to attack Thomas’ politics; he has every right to believe in whatever he chooses. He’s never kept his political beliefs secret, either. The guy uses a lot of the Tea Party imagery on his goalie mask, and he’s gone on record as saying that he’d like to have dinner with Glenn Beck. He’s a Tea Party guy, which makes it weird that he’s in a union. But I guess that’s fine. For me, politicizing what is essentially a photo opportunity that plenty of other people have done is just dumb.

There are a lot of predictable reactions from morons on the internet as well as idiots like Greg Wyshynski saying that what Thomas did was admirable or even his actions of skipping an afternoon press conference as somehow standing up for free speech. It wasn’t. It was somebody drawing another needless line in the sand and creating a culture war where there wasn’t one.

I can see it now: Thomas is going to be a pariah for some and a hero to others for deciding to stay at his hotel in D.C. yesterday. If he’s lucky he might even see some of the Tebow effect rub off on him and some Red State Cash will find its way into his pocket. But it’s all for an idiotic reason. If Thomas was the patriot that he claims to be, he would have been at the White House meeting the President. You salute the rank and not the man, after all.

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