Editor’s Note:  This is our very first guest column, from a brand-new member here at WordPress.  Rudyard “Duke” Milhaus will be manning our Sports Desk here at the only true source for unbiased news on the Web.  I know I can count on you all to make him feel welcome.

So, let’s talk about football, that game where one side tries to move a ball over the other side’s goal line.  A game of military precision, where it’s brutal, and quite frankly damaging to the players. In modern football, there are pads to deflect the blows and minimize the damage done, but injuries still happen from time to time.

As barbaric as this game is to some, I’m sure most will agree that the cheerleaders are quite cute.  You know: those bubbly, spirited gals on the sidelines rooting for their team to win. They aren’t required to know the rules or even follow the game, they just need to cheer loud and often.

This may come as a shock to some.  How can one cheer for a team if they don’t understand the rules?  They won’t have any idea if that team is winning, or cheating, or even playing dirty. I myself can’t see how anyone would cheer for a team that has sullied its morals to the point that winning at any cost becomes normal. But the home team is always the rightful team, no matter the cost of the win.

And so we compare this to modern politics.  As divided and screwed up our country is, we still see the blind cheerleaders screaming at the tops of their lungs, rooting for a win at all costs. This doesn’t bode well for our people, or our politics in the future for that matter. This is the most damaging of all the rhetoric out there, as it doesn’t matter if it’s factual. It matters if it’s believable.

Somewhere in the middle, we have the refs, those of us who are free thinkers (yes, there are some of those left even in the press), trying to sift through all the mess and find the truth. Because all too often we have players who break the rules. They’re mostly minor infractions, but sometimes they get called on personal fouls and penalized harshly. As things should be, in football and in politics.

No matter how many penalties we call, the penalized team will cry for a replay, that it was a bogus call. When confronted with real facts, most cheerleaders will ignore them and still cheer loudly, and the fans cry “How dare anyone find fault with our team?” The referees exist to balance the playing field, and call players out when they break the rules. They are there to find fault, and educate — both the players and the cheerleaders — about the rules of the game.

Some of the fans are so obsessed with the home team that they will start fights over whose team is better. They will become quite aggressive if you like their rival, and it’s a brave soul who will disrespect their team in a hometown bar on game day.

When that happens, the spirit of competition is gone, never mind sportsmanship.

In politics, “May the best team win!” no longer applies. When it comes right down to it, these days we have nothing left but sore winners and sore losers. Those of us who used to live in the middle have less and less of a place to stand, and you can’t make good calls when you’re being tackled right alongside quarterback.

It’s up to us as citizens to correct this, but how can we when all there is is two warring teams, nobody left in the stands, and twenty thousand sharply divided cheerleaders who can’t even understand the penalties on the field?

Somewhere, someday, if we’re not careful both sides will crack and neither team will be able to claim victory.  The way things are, that would most likely end the political system in our country. Adding a third team has been put out there as a way to help rectify things, but in the end all I see it doing is bringing the two sides together for a little while. The big boys will ally just long enough to crush anything that changes the game, and the cheerleaders will just keep cheering.  After all, if their team can’t be crowned champion, nobody can.

“Duke” Milhaus is no relation to either Richard Nixon or the estimable Raoul Duke, though all three do share a certain uncanny resemblance.  There are some who call him… Tim?