Michael Powell, a longtime reporter and columnist for The New York Times, now writes a sports column in the paper. In his Wednesday column on Tom Brady, “A Quarterback Hands Off the Dirty Work,” he threw a low blow in Liberal Land. He compared Brady to Richard Nixon.
The “Deflategate” probe for the NFL discovered Brady had a cellphone with 10,000 text messages on it. Brady didn’t destroy it; he ordered a flunky to destroy it.
Rather than deep-six the phone on his own, making a soaring pitch into the Charles River or Dorchester Bay, he ordered an underling to destroy it. That, of course, left another witness to the act. Then again, the disease of rich and powerful men is to lose the ability to take care of even the simplest act on their own.
My natural inclination is to sympathize with defendants. Brady’s defense, however, has piled the improbable atop the unlikely and has tried my patience, not to mention my common sense. His destroyed-cellphone defense calls to mind Richard Nixon, whose secretary, Rose Mary Woods, claimed that in a yogilike stretch of arm, back and leg, she had managed to mistakenly erase a key 18-minute stretch of tape that just might have proved that the president had committed a criminal act.
Notice the Times reached back to the Watergate days of the 1970s for a political analogy when the Hillary-destroys-her-mail analogy is so much newer and fresher!
