Dear Commons Community,

For football fans, this past weekend was the beginning of the National Football League’s playoffs.    On Sunday, the injury to the Washington Redskins phenomenal quarterback, Robert Griffin III (or RGIII) was all the talk because many questioned whether his coach, Mike Shanahan, should have left him in the game after injuring his knee.  New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd’s take on it, is that Shanahan and the Redskins behaved the same way the rest of Washington behaves that is concerned with only with the short-term and sacrificing the long term:

“Robert Griffin III and Alfred Morris, the stellar Redskins rookies, were such appealing palliatives to our ugly, nihilistic politics and our cascade of lurid sports scandals…But then, on Sunday, the spell snapped when the knee snapped. Coach Mike Shanahan committed malpractice, letting a hobbled young quarterback lurch around “like a pirate with a peg leg,” as The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins wrote. The autocratic, crusty 60-year-old, who makes $7 million a year, risked the kid’s career and the team’s future trying to win a wild-card playoff game ….

At that moment, the Redskins became like the rest of Washington, and the rest of our self-centered, grasshopper attention-span culture — going for short-term gain and avoiding long-term pain.

Everything they do on Capitol Hill is about getting through the next few months, or next few minutes, or next confrontation. John Boehner, after making a mess of the negotiations with the president, is now talking about raising the debt limit in monthly increments. What’s wrong with weekly, or how about hourly?

Like Congress patching gaping fiscal wounds, the Redskins didn’t seem to fathom that they were damaging the franchise long term. “Trying to win that game, they risked 120 victories over the next 10 years,” the writer David Israel told me. “That’s crazy.”

And so is Washington politics!

Tony