Buckeyes humiliate Badgers

Dear God, 59-0? Bucky may as well have not even gone to the Big Ten title game if that was going to be the result. Not that they would have beaten an OSU team playing like that on any day, but that's a total humiliation.

I hadn't seen people from Ohio kick Wisconsinites' asses and laugh them off the stage since....last month.

During the 1995-96 budget dispute between Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress, Walker said, “Clinton did not say the Republicans in Congress aren’t going to work with me so I’m going to do an executive order.”

“He sat down with them,” Walker said.

Kasich, who like Walker just won re-election to a second term in a Rust Belt, labor-dominated state, snapped almost matter-of-factly.

“No, he shut the government — the government got shut down first,” Kasich said.

The audience laughed. And then the two men, both of them likely to run for president in 2016, began to talk over each other as NBC’s "Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd stroked his red goatee in delight.

“There was tremendous animosity,” Kasich said, almost yelling, to remind the younger Walker that he, Kasich, had been there himself as a member of Congress.

“It wasn’t —” Walker tried to get out before Kasich cut him off.

“Scott, it was!” Kasich said. “I’ll tell you, when you’re sitting around and we’ve got Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole at each other over a shutdown, it wasn’t easy either.”

Walker went on to finish his point, which was basically that Obama is unwilling to work with Republicans and is wrongly going forward on his own with the immigration executive order.

Kasich waited for him to finish, and then continued to contrast himself with Walker and the other Republican governors onstage — Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Indiana’s Mike Pence and Texas’ Rick Perry — who are all looking hard at running for president. The message Kasich wanted to make clear, and the one he appears likely to carry into a crowded presidential primary, was that he is not a typical Republican who simply opposes Obama, criticizes Democrats and talks about the need to cut taxes. Instead, he conveyed, he is a problem solver who wants economic growth but also wants government to help people and fix things.

“My only point is, I don’t like what [Obama’s] doing,” Kasich said, “but what I will say: This is emblematic of where we’re going forward as a country. I mean, are we going to deal with the real problems of health care, the real problem of immigration, the real problem of a divided country?”

“If we had not got the Clinton people to the table to negotiate … we would never have balanced the budget,” Kasich said. “Nothing gets fixed without some bipartisan support. You can’t do it without bipartisan support.”

The only difference is that no one in sports media would even try to claim that Ohio State didn't show they were on a different level than the Badgers yesterday- they'd be fired if they even tried. But you can bet the ChuckTodds of the world will try to make it sound like Kasich and Walker are equal levels of statesmen with equal fitness for president. And you wonder why I think sports journalists are more legit than political ones, and why it's no coincidence that people such as Charles Pierce and Keith Olbermann have done a better job at "telling it like it is" in recent years than our more "serious" journalists with a lifetime of Capitol Hill experience?