Seahawks offer Kaepernick tryout, but cancel it when he refuses to promise he’ll stand for national anthem

I wonder if the Seahawks ever really wanted him in the first place. I sure as heck wouldn’t want him on the Vikings, given that he would be a nonstop magnet for unwanted attention that would be highly disproportionate to his value on the football field. But they offered a tryout, and a reasonable person might consider it unsurprising that they’d want to know the anthem-kneeling nonsense wouldn’t start all over again if they signed him. The NFL is trying to move past this and isn’t going to jump at the chance to sign people who are more concerned with being social justice warriors than they are at being football players.

---

No dice. Kaepernick wouldn’t say he’ll stand for the anthem. I guess that’s better than lying to them about it, but don’t think Kaepernick doesn’t get some benefit from this whole affair. His hero-worshipers at USA Today are hailing him as The Most Principled Man Alive:

No matter how systematically and powerfully the NFL has tried to tell its players to stick to sports, scared witless of jeopardizing its ability to profit off a fantasy, Colin Kaepernick and what he created by protesting the national anthem is bigger than any backup quarterback job when it comes with strings attached. So while there’s certainly going to be a segment of the public that uses Thursday’s reported turn of events with Kaepernick and the Seahawks to wave their I-told-you-sos at the so-called Social Justice Warriors they despise so much, perhaps the real story here is that Kaepernick remains a man of exceptional principle. Faced with a rare opportunity to potentially return to the league, according to ESPN, Kaepernick refused to assure Seattle brass that he would stand for the national anthem this season, causing the team to postpone a scheduled workout. Surely by now, Kaepernick knows what that means. Teams that needed a quarterback last season passed. He hasn’t even had a tryout since he last played in 2016. The more time that passes since his last live snap, the less likely it is he’ll ever get another one. But at this point, any attempt to sign Kaepernick with the condition that his kneeling days are over feels like little more than a setup. Given his historical significance in the context of sports protests — and the fact he’s built credibility that extends beyond the culture of football — going back now on the league’s terms would do more harm than good.

---

---

See how Kaepernick’s apologists are playing this? If no one will sign him, it’s an injustice. If they’ll give him a chance but they want him to stand for the anthem, it’s a setup! The only thing that’s acceptable to these people is if Kaepernick is allowed to return and do all the same things he was doing before, which caused massive headaches for the NFL – the people who would be paying his salary once again if he was allowed to return and resume his nonsense. And let’s not forget the most important point in all this: Kaepernick’s cause is a fraud. He’s slandering police officers by accusing them of being racist murderers of black people, when they are not, and in almost every case Kaepernick thinks justifies this charge, the actual facts either vindicated the police completely or at the very least presented a much more complicated picture than the cop-haters would have you believe was the case. But Kaepernick is going to be hailed a “principled” because he refuses to stand for the anthem even if it means he doesn’t get a job. All right, then, I have a question: If Kaepernick is as good a quarterback as his fan club claims he is, then why aren’t the owners also principled for refusing to sign him, as they think respect for the flag is more important than winning football games? Either way, if this makes it even more likely that we never see Colin Kaepernick on a football field again, good. He doesn’t deserve to be there.

---