From today’s Slate:

“But in today’s Washington, golf is an intensely Republican sport. George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, and Rick Santorum are all fanatics. John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi are decidedly not. Which stands to reason: The corporate, country-club veneer of golf fits more easily with modern Republican culture. Plus, golf tends to thrive in red-state regions, like the Sun Belt, where open land is plentiful and to which the GOP’s power base has recently shifted.”

And more where that came from.

Now, given my familial bias toward the sport, it is perhaps no real surprise that such a broad generalization immediately gets my back up. And I might even have given him that big stretch, if he didn’t follow it up with this:

“At the same time, the Republican obsession with golf reveals the party’s phony posturing as the champion of average Americans. All the hand-wringing among Democrats about why liberals don’t go to NASCAR races or duck hunts misses the fact that Tom DeLay and Bill Frist don’t go to monster-truck night with the guys from Deliverance either. They hit the links at exclusive country clubs with rich donors and corporate lobbyists. That’s who they are. Golf is an expression of the party’s elite upper-class id.”

And that’s where Crowley goes off the rails, frankly. Implying that golfers tend toward the higher end of the wealth and income spectrum is at least an arguable position; suggesting that a sport is somehow a reflection of class and social stratification and that that reflection is ingrained into a decades-old political party’s structure is ludicrous. Is basketball’s respect of and for a player’s personal space on the court indicative of libertarian belief in privacy above all? Is Democratic multiculturization revealed in baseball’s increasingly nationally diverse rosters? Does uttering “there is no ‘i’ in team” make you a Communist?

And what, then, of those enthusiasts not in the GOP — are they, too, phonily posturing as champions of average Americans? Or is that simply if you’re a card-carrying elephant?

The real argument, here, would seem to be Crowley’s irritation with the spread of influence through money, which would be hard to disagree with — and it’s certainly relevant in Ohio today — but suggesting that corruption, graft and golf go hand in hand… well, no. For every golf outing, there’s a fundraising dinner, or a charity auction, or some other means to put lobbyist and legislator together in a non-office setting.

If you must attack golf and/or Republicans and/or politicians in general and/or the wealthy elite, do it with what’s there, not with what isn’t.