WINNERS: 

The National Anthem: The third song off Radiohead’s Kid A remains a bizarre, fascinating classic

The 1800s: Roy Moore’s victory in the Republican primary for Alabama’s vacant Senate seat was a major coup for the embattled century

Dale Earnhardt, Jr.: NASCAR’s longtime most popular driver tweeted in support of the protesters, which has resulted in the left absolutely not instantly beatifying him based upon fairly unfounded assumptions about a person who has always remained fairly private about issues like this, because that would be jumping the gun a bit

Scott Pruitt: Even by the standards of this administration, the degree to which the head of the EPA has gotten away with wasting taxpayer money in service of an utterly evil agenda is amazing

America’s billionaires: Whether it’s milking the anthem protests to win free publicity for the sports team they own or the imminent receipt of millions of dollars in wholly unnecessary tax cuts, the hideous, distended plutocrats poisoning every facet of American society are having a pretty good time of it

Kyle Busch: Won Sunday’s race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, meaning that other than Dale Jr., he’s the only figure in NASCAR to come out of last weekend as a winner

The Star-Spangled Banner (both flag and song): Last weekend reminded us that these legendary American symbols should be treated with respect, such as being turned into novelty underwear or absolutely butchered in an attempt to self-promotionally exploit abstract notions of patriotism

 

LOSERS: 

The co-opting of protest activity and imagery for self-serving purposes: Just because a bunch of people online took Sunday’s demonstrations to be a direct expression of resistance to Trump, and just because several Trump-donor NFL owners knelt with their teams while looking annoyingly self-satisfied, doesn’t mean that this noxious trend is going to bury the underlying message on which this movement was originally founded

Whatever these protests were originally about: Beats me

Tom Price: Leaves the Trump Administration having defrauded at least a million dollars’ worth of taxpayer money, an embarrassingly subpar sum

The Democratic Party: Will likely barely put up a fight against Roy Moore, having learned during last year’s election that they’re totally incapable of beating a panphobic right-wing lunatic

U.S. Soccer: Continues to mandate that its players stand for the national anthem, impressively finding a way to disappoint the country even when when not playing

Colin Kaepernick: Did… did Sports Illustrated just whitewash him out of the movement he started

Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan: Whether or not their awful tax reform plans succeed, we can enjoy yet another laugh at their continuing and abject failure to repeal Obamacare

NASCAR: Ironically for a sport built on speed, took a good 24 hours to offer even a milquetoast refutation of the team owners who said anyone who kneeled for the anthem “oughta be out of the country”

Richard Nixon: Would be pretty frustrated to realize that he could have gotten away with all of it if he’d only been alive a half century later

Puerto Rico: *sigh*

 

Image: Andy Jacobson, The Dallas Morning News / Bo Nash, Wikimedia Commons / Brook Ward, Flickr Commons / Public domain / Public domain /