Rod Marinelli is no Politician

If only politicians were as easily separated from their jobs as coaches are.

Rod Marinelli, the oft ridiculed coach of the hapless Detroit Lions, cleaned out his locker today at Ford Field. His team finished 0-16.

“You can’t go 0-16 and expect to keep your job,” Marinelli said in a news conference. “I didn’t conquer anything. I got defeated.”

There is no way to nuance an 0-16 record. A record like that is self defining. Sports teams are pretty easy to figure out.

Football, like sports in general, is a zero sum game. That is, whenever one team wins, another loses. At the end of the year you have, all teams combined, a .500 record. When exposed to such brutal measurement, it is easy to pick the winners and losers.

Oh that it were so in politics, where the winners and losers are so intertwined with regulation, obfuscation, and political favoritism that it is almost impossible to find where the wins and losses are listed.

That is why someone like Barney Frank can stand before the whole world and declare with certainty that there is nothing systematically wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He can spend a large portion of his career doing his level best to submarine any and all changes designed to steer the mortgage giants toward fiscal health, this while collecting into his campaign coffers large amounts of Fannie and Freddie donated cash. Which, by the way, came in pretty handy in that last election, months after Fan and Fred melted down.

So, Rod Marinelli is out of work and Barney Frank is gainfully employed. One man will wear his 0-16 record like an albatross around his neck for the rest of his coaching career. The other has sidestepped all culpability for his miserable record and will ride the crest of a successful blame game into another term in the Congress while sitting at the helm of the Financial Services Committee.

Its good work if you can get it.