I am not a big American football fan, but I do follow the Pats from the corner of my eye. They just crushed the San Diego Chargers at the end of a week where their coach was fined $500K, the team $250K and two draft picks, for illegally video-taping opposition team’s signals. (This of course pales in comparison to the $100 million (yes, that DOLLAR ONE HUNDRED MILLION) fine that Formula 1 is making McLaren pay, on top of stripping them of their constructors’ championship points…)

In response to the claim that the Pats owed the victory to their recent travails, to

 all manner of chortling and gloating about how the team had managed to overcome the stigma of the media’s pointing out that its head coach had gotten caught behaving like an arrogant jackass. A team this good, this dominant, got to cast itself in its own mind as outraged innocents battling to stick it to The Man.

Charles Pierce at Slate.com writes:

It was like watching conservatives talk about how Michael Moore was picking on them while they were running the entire government.

So well put, in so many different levels…