So which story do you think will get more coverage over the next 12 hours?

• A-Rod, a.k.a. Alex Rodriguez, who has kinda sorta almost not really admitted that he used steroids for a couple of years maybe and then probably not except for the fact that relatives kept randomly stabbing him in the ass with needles; or

• R-Stand, a.k.a. Robert Stanford, who allegedly is behind a “massive ongoing fraud” for selling some $8 billion in uninsured certificates of deposit and who now looks like another Bernie Madoff — and whose depositors seemed to think that the Caribbean island of Antigua was some sort of magical ATM machine.

I’m guessing the former, of course, which is just completely and utterly ridiculous even if it is predictable.  The icing on the cake, however, is this quote from Winston Churchill, which appeared in the NYT today:

The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country.

Where did I find it?  In a story about Stanford or Madoff?  Nope.  It was in the Times’s baseball blog.

Perhaps Churchill got it wrong.  Perhaps he should have said,

The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals — and understanding who the real criminals are –  is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country.

To be clear, I’m not excusing A-PED, A-Rod.  But his alleged crimes are both tiny and pathetic when compared to the audacity of Madoff, Stanford and their ilk.  Some may argue that A-Rod is a role model, and that he should be held to a high(er) standard because of his influence and impact on the youth of America.

Please.

Setting aside the whole Madonna thing for the moment, why is A-Rod a role model?  Because he is a star athlete?  Or because he has made, and will make, something in the range of half a billion dollars for his abilities?  If we’re honest with ourselves, it’s the latter.

The reality is that we now worship wealth, not talent.

That’s what A-Rod, R-Stand, and B-Mad have in common:  they’re all crooks who cheated their way to big payoffs, and did so while thousands/millions cheered them on.  And that’s what makes investors and sports fans alike as well:  they (we) all drank the Kool-Aid in the hopes that what should have been so blatantly-obviously-completely-freaking-bloody-unlikely was somehow a new reality, one where everyone could make huge sums of money without explanation and an athlete could shatter the record book in a way that suggested that he was outside the realm of statistical probability.

Our entire economic, political, and even pop cultural landscape has become a series of Ponzi schemes: massive, patently unrealistic, and technically impossible frauds that we have ignored in the hopes that – maybe, somehow, oh God please let it be so — the iron laws of economics and politics and even baseball somehow had changed.

Sorry folks.  Superman still can’t fly.  Athletes still can’t consistently hit 50 home runs, much less 60.  And hedge fund managers can’t actually create new wealth out of nothing.

What an awful, horrible mess we have become.

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