Looks like Shaq is playing (poorly) in Beijing, and Cal Ripken is on his way right right behind him:The former Orioles superstar said yesterday that he didn't accept the unpaid post to make a political statement but rather to work with children from other nations on baseball.Including a spine, no doubt. Not that he or Shaq would know what to do with it. It was LSU grad O'Neal who got weirded weirded out by a Spike Lee Joint and used it as an excuse to wonder aloud if Post-Katrina New Orleans could handle an All-Star Game.
...
Bill Whalen, a research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said Ripken probably feels comfortable with Bush because he senses that the president "is a baseball man."
"But I don't think Cal Ripken has any political bones in his body," Whalen said.
Same thing here: If Cal doesn't know that playing photo op with a bunch of Chinese kids a year before the Beijing Olympics is a political act, or if he doesn't care what Condoleeza Rice's calculus is in this whole thing, then that's no less embarrassing than Shaq telling the press he wants to buy Yao Ming some rims.
