Conservative Trash Talk
From those intellectual titans at The National Review:
GO STEELERS! [Michael Novak] So it’s steeltown America on the rise, the rough and the ready, not a rich team but always fighting and always playing smash-mouth, and running hard, and slashing… and I love it that their opponents this year will be wearing the colors of —hard to comprehend this — Hamas! Couldn’t be a better opponent, who will probably be favored. …. Pittsburgh is the city of the Deerslayer, and the American flag, and always the highest casualty rates in American wars … This is the city where they make steel, the first and the best on any continent. They make steel with white-hot heat, and fire, and rolling mills, in open spaces where men sometimes fell into molten steel, or molten steel spilled on them, and the smell (my old, now dead uncle once told me) was one you never forgot…This is Tough Town U.S.A., tough and vulgar and often mean … and where people have heart, and don’t quit. They don’t ask for a break, and don’t expect one, because they haven’t experienced many. Last quarter, seven minutes to play, and down fourteen points? That’s life! … All of us here are used to it, so lower your head, plow straight on, and be determined not to be stopped, until you win. I love the Pittsburgh spirit. ’ Against Adversity’ is its middle name. Here they pronounce it ‘grit.’
It’s bad enough that all the media can talk about leading up to the game is Pittsburgh, acting like Seattle doesn’t belong there, but now our Hawks are being compared to Hamas?
Actually, Pittsburghers should be more offended by this post than Seattleites. It's a patronizing caricature of a stubborn old Pittsburgh and not the new Pittsburgh that has adapted to changing times.
By the way, I should add that this conservative publication is describing a very blue city in a blue state.