According to the article “Waxman Regrets Hearing was Held” in the Sports Section of the Feb. 15 issue of The New York Times, Henry A. Waxman (D-Cal.), the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, regrets holding the nationally televised hearing over Yankees’ pitcher Roger Clemens’s alleged steroid abuse because “the four-hour hearing unnecessarily embarrassed Clemens.” One only needed to browse the front page of the same issue to see why Waxman should have tacked “and the government of the United States” to the end of his statement.

First, we had the unfortunately unsurprising events in DeKalb, Ill., where a lone gunman brandished a shotgun from behind a curtain at the front of a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and fired into a class of students, shooting several in the head, before turning his own into hamburger meat.

Then we had Sgt. Erin Edwards, the veteran shown standing in Saddam Hussein’s spider hole, smiling radiantly in her helmet and fatigues. She returned to a base in Texas where her husband, Sgt. William Edwards, battered her in the throes of his symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. When she moved out, he waited for her at her new residence and shot her head off before eating a bullet himself.

Keeping these two events in mind, allow me to pose a question: Why is Congress spending America’s hard- earned tax dollars holding hearings over the use of performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball when they’re so clearly needed to confront more pressing issues in our country? American college students are killing each other on a regular basis. The soldiers bravely fighting a losing war in Iraq are returning home to kill each other. Our economy is sinking into a recession. And the list goes on.

Even the most convincing argument in Waxman’s favor—the case of professional wrestler Chris Benoit, who took a day off for a family emergency and killed his wife and child—folds under scrutiny. An autopsy proved that media accusations of steroid use and roid-rage were unfounded. A cocktail of Xanax, hydrocodone and a synthetic form of testosterone were found in his system, but the chief medical examiner attributed the testosterone levels to Benoit’s treatment for a deficiency caused by previous steroid abuse and affirmed that no roid-rage was involved.

So I say, if the great American icon Roger Clemens wants his trainer to shoot Primo in his ass, let him. There are more important issues in this world, and athletes on steroids are what make baseball worth watching, anyway.