The trials and tribulations of Michael Vick made their way back into the national consciousness again this week, when Vick was transported from his home in Leavenworth to Virginia to face more charges related to his dog fighting escapades.  How lovely for us and our consciousness.  Of course everyone in the NFL knows by now that the Vick situation is off-limits as a subject of conversation - that any remark construable as even a round-about defense of Vick’s inhumanity to canine is going to get them lambasted in the media and perhaps even bodily attacked by a flour-wielding PETA nut, so better to just stay a million miles away from that whole can of worms.  Right?  Uh…wrong.

Unbelievable as it may seem, there is actually an NFL player with little enough grasp of how things work to think it is still appropriate to make favorable public remarks toward Michael Vick.  Not surprisingly, that person is Joey Porter - a man who, at some point in his life, lost every last trace of the precious filter that keeps the brain’s more embarrassing and destructive formulations from finding their way to the mouth and thence into the world at-large.  Joey thinks Mike got a raw deal - thinks we’re all hypocrites for making a big deal about pit bull murder.  Thinks pit bulls are unfairly maligned?  Joey ’splains:

All it was was dogs. They act like they don’t even like pit bulls. That’s the funny thing about it. I got pit bulls. I got to put them under a different breed just to travel. You can’t fly pit bulls nowhere.

It’s not even like they were fighting cocker spaniels or something they like. They don’t even so much care about pit bulls. Nobody.

I’ve read that over five times and I’m still not sure what Joey was driving at.  He finds it paradoxical that the world should persecute Mike Vick for killing pit bulls when the world doesn’t even really like pit bulls?  No wonder there are so many angry pit bulls - they all have a persecution complex.  And it’s also too bad that Joey has so much trouble transporting his pit bulls and is forced to list them under a different breed.  My God, those poor animals - think of the identity crisis they must be suffering.  Is there such a thing as a breed-change operation?  Cause Joey’s pit bulls need one.  Maybe he could make them into terriers or some of those little mini-dogs Paris Hilton likes - the ones you can buy two at a time and make little earrings out of.

Actually, the substance of Joey’s remarks - and never was the word “substance” employed more broadly - is irrelevant.  It’s even possible that Joey might have a point (in some parallel universe where talking bullshit is the same as making sense) - but so what?  It’s not a point worth making - not when all it’s going to win you is more scorn and more derision and more people calling you the dumbest bastard since Donovan McNabb.  Doesn’t Joey understand PR?  I hope someone in the Dolphins organization gets to him quick and shuts him up before he makes it any worse.  It’s a short leap from “pit bulls are misunderstood” and “Mike Vick is being unfairly persecuted” to “Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy in the beginning, you know” and “9/11 was a conspiracy between George Bush and Ben and Jerry’s to make people really stressed and sell them more Chunky Monkey.”

Of course, it’s just possible that Joey doesn’t care about all that.  He may be so oblivious to people’s perceptions of him that he actually thinks he’s being heroic.  In which case, he is not only stupid but delusional.  And then the Dolphins will have to work even harder to shut him up - or just hope that people are so used to Joey saying stupid stuff that no one actually takes him seriously.  It’s just Joey being Joey.  Maybe they could trade him to the Dodgers?  How’s his batting-eye?