The Philadelphia Eagles took the field before Sunday's Super Bowl kickoff to the "tune" of "Dreams and Nightmares" by rapper Meek Mill.
The cowardly sports press has avoided criticizing the team and its players for their horrible de facto endorsement of Mill and their objections to his alleged persecution.
Sunday at American Thinker (link contains some of the "song's" profane lyrics, and is not safe for work), Colin Flaherty accurately described the Eagles' support of Mill as typifying "everything about how far professional football has fallen and how the NFL celebrates the obscene, the vulgar, the dangerous, and the foolish."
Luckily for the nation, it was next to impossible for TV viewers to discern the "song's" lyrics as the Eagles took the field (again, those profane lyrics are not safe for work, or children):
Flaherty accurately describes "Dreams and Nightmares" as:
... about guns, drugs, money, b*tches, and murder, over and over and over. Just like the rest of Meek Mill songs, which also include a healthy dollop of the evils of the white man.
Slang versions of the N-word appear 26 times in the "song" (readers will have to find the full lyrics on their own). Misogyny also rules ("hoes" get three mentions).
Mill, who is now 30, is a convicted criminal. His 2009 parole has been extended several times because he has frequently flouted its terms. He was sentenced to a second parole violation-related prison term of 2-4 years in early November.
The supposed outrage of that sentence got the Eagles' attention. Per Flaherty:
The Eagles and Meek Mill adopted each other, with the Eagles and other Meek Mill partisans selling eager reporters on one fairy tale after another of police misconduct, judicial corruption, and circumstantial evidence.
But they do not talk about what is in Meek Mill’s music.
Neither does the sports press, at least not honestly.
Before the Super Bowl, Harry Lyles Jr. at SBnation.com described "Dreams and Nightmares" as "a wonderful rage-filled sermon," and found it "cool to see the Eagles rally around a song that is from a local famous rapper."
A Sunday evening item at SI.com replayed the team's Super Bowl entrance and told readers about Mill's parole violation sentence. It did not describe or warn readers about the content of the song.
The Eagles are free to exercise their bad judgment off the field. But they shouldn't have dragged the NFL into their advocacy on the sport's biggest stage.
The league and feckless Commissioner Roger Goodell had to know what was coming and could easily have stopped it, but didn't. This is the same NFL which rejected a Super Bowl 52 program ad from a veterans group because of an impermissible hashtag (#PleaseStand). It's the same NFL which zealously polices players' uniforms, and which rejected the Dallas Cowboys request to wear a patch memorializing five slain Dallas police officers during the 2016 regular season.
And they wonder why the league's TV ratings, including Sunday's Super Bowl, have fallen sharply.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
