Uhhhh…What He Said?

Straight-talking Ozzie Guillen (our new favorite performance artist) certainly has the given the columnists something to write about and the radio guys something to talk about. Some people are taking him to task for being an ass. Some people are making excuses for him.

And then there’s Mike Downey of the hopelessly biased Chicago Tribune. He wrote about Guillen today. But I’m not sure which side of the fence he’s on. Maybe it’s because he spent half his column talking about Dusty Baker and how bad the Cubs are (see – it’s that typical Tribune bias again…). Mostly it’s because of this:

When a man in Guillen’s position uses an F-word about a certain individual, as he has quite often, he is within his right, exactly as he would be about an umpire or darn near anybody else. Just not that F-word – about anyone, under any circumstances, in public.

Guillen exonerates himself by calling this his Venezuelan way of calling a man a coward, not a homosexual. I get that. But to use such a word in the workplace can be an offense punishable by a suspension or a firing. In this case the Sox skipper simply was trying to be his filthy, funny self.

But it is inexcusable in any case. The word is incendiary.

To recap the arguments: Ozzie can say all the bad words he wants. Except those that are really bad – especially if he’s in public (behind closed doors, he can say whatever he wants). Downey totally gets Ozzie’s position that the word in question means something quite different in Venezuela. But it’s still really, really bad – and saying it could earn you a pink slip.

But, oh, that Ozzie – he’s just a funny guy. Except he shouldn’t have said that, ‘cause it’s really bad.

And they said John Kerry flip-flopped…