by Frank James
President Bush, the nation’s baseball fan-in-chief, offered his first public response to the Mitchell Report on the use of illegal performance-enhancing steroid drugs by Major League Baseball players. It came in response to a reporter’s question following the president’s meeting with his cabinet this morning.
The president was being unduly modest in styling himself as a mere fan. He was “merely” one of the former owners of the Texas Rangers. He
, in fact, from selling his stake in that baseball team.
Bush was a team owner during what is now being called the Steroids Era in professional baseball, a period during which, the Mitchell Report says, owners were complicit in the “juicing” of players. So people will naturally be wondering what the president knew of the problem when he was an owner.
The president raised the steroid-in-sports issue to a presidential level when he mentioned, in his 2004 State of the Union speech the need to fight the use of such drugs, especially since younger athletes were at risk of using them and damaging their bodies.