Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Ravi forwarded me the following excerpt from a Salon article which quotes Bill Clinton from a recent Larry King interview. Anyway, here's what our former President had to say (which I largely agree with):

"First of all, keep in mind that as I understand it Major League Baseball did not adopt a clear, unequivocal ban on steroid use with consequences, like the Olympics has had for years, until recently ... Well, my experience is in politics and everything else, if you're in a great contest with high stakes, people will do what it takes to win within the framework of the rules ... It's clear now that there is an overwhelming, perhaps unanimous consensus among the owners and the players and the representatives and the media that steroid use is not only bad for the players, it's bad for the game and it's wrong, and it should be banned and there should be consequences for violating the ban ... But I think we have to be careful looking back before that was the rule and even before that was the consensus ... We need to remember that baseball itself was highly ambivalent about doing anything about this, facing the truth and having strict rules for years and years and years. So now we have the rules. Let's go forward and enforce them. But I think ... looking back and looking down on people and trying to claim that, you know, things that happened five, 10 years ago in their careers weren't real because they did this -- I think that's a little hypocritical. Where were we then and why didn't we ban it then if that's the way we feel?"

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