Soccer is Gay, But Not Socialist

From a Sully reader:

Soccer really has very few rules compared to other sports. There are no regulations on how the players can be aligned, the clock doesn't stop once the game starts, etc.  It sounds like a conservative's paradise to me.  Football - which I assume Thiessen believes is more "American" - has an incredible array of rules and regulations.  There are rules about where the offensive players can line up before the play starts; defenders aren't allowed to touch receivers more than five yards from the line of scrimmage; defensive players can't hit an defenseless player, etc.  There are even regulations on what number you can have, how you wear your socks and the league office is constantly tweaking the rules to favor one side of the ball over the other.  And they even punish players for off-the-field actions that are unpleasant but not against the law.  I don't know how a conservative could love such a tightly regulated sport.

Of course one reason would be that faux-hawk conservatives love to refer to football as "war," and, just like the games they watch every Sunday, actual wars are nothing but games with little plastic men to move around the globe so they can pound their chests on cable news shows. Which is ironic in this case, since if there's one sport wherein a game could actually lead to a flat-out war, it'd be soccer. Hey, those people are fucking nuts. Meanwhile, as brutally violent as football is, after the game the players have a tendency to pat each other on the ass and share a bucket of wings at Hooters.

Of course, at the end of the day, the simple fact is that the guy that started the whole 'soccer is socialist" thing is just incredibly fucking stupid, and probably shouldn't be getting paid to write things for public consumption.