You know how Mahmoud is. Always obsessing over his Fantasy Football roster.

The #NFL season will start this week, unfortunately once again @Kaepernick7 is not on a NFL roster. Even though he is one of the best Quarterbacks in the league.#ColinKaepernick #NFL

— Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (@Ahmadinejad1956) September 3, 2018

If Kaep is one of the best in the league, Blaine Gabbert must be the next Tom Brady.

I was confused at first about why the Holocaust-denying former president of Iran was tweeting about the NFL but then I remembered that apparently I died at some point a few years ago and landed in hell, where world leaders sh*tpost on social media as routinely and stupidly as pimply teen edgelords do. This is Ahmadinejad trolling Trump about his preoccupation with the NFL protests, and maybe doing a little bit more than that:

When I interviewed Ahmadinejad he—like other Iranian officials—practiced whataboutism. He responded to criticism by changing the subject. When asked about Iranians imprisoned for protesting, Ahmadinejad replied that the United States imprisons “all sorts of people,” and that millions were behind bars. In this way he avoided answering for the acts of his own government…

[W]hataboutism is the most straightforward way to understand Ahmadinejad’s NFL tweet. In effect he is saying, “See? You Americans punish dissent, too.”

Yes and no. It’s true that Kaepernick going unsigned, even as a back-up, in an era when quarterback play is mostly garbage seems suspicious. He took the Niners to the Super Bowl; every QB in the league, including third-stringers, is better than him? But claiming you’ve “sacrificed everything” when you’re making more for an ad campaign than most people will make in a lifetime is asking to be mocked, particularly when the debate over anthem theater so often invokes the troops. Kaep may have sacrificed a lucrative career that was already in decline for a lucrative post-career and Woke Icon status for millions of people. He hasn’t sacrificed “everything.” Neither has Nike in mounting this campaign:

I suspect that @Nike has a good sense of where their target demographic is on the Anthem Protests. pic.twitter.com/NVVKunWxRb

— Brian Schaffner (@b_schaffner) September 4, 2018

I’m gonna guess that the company’s marketing people ran the numbers on Kaep and his likely effect on sales before boldly weighing in on this debate. It reminds me of Fearless Girl, another case of corporate advertising shrewdly dressed up as a social-justice statement. The punchline this time is that, until today, Nike has mostly been known to the Socially Conscious as a sweatshop exploiter. Turns out all those Chinese slave laborers needed to make them more palatable was number 7 Niners’ jerseys.

But none of this matters, really, when I remember that I’m in hell:

When a radical anti-Semite, anti-American Iranian dictator emphatically agrees with you, maybe that’s a sign that Beto, the NFL, and Nike are all on the wrong side of the American people…. https://t.co/7MYcLfIsBz

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 4, 2018

Exit question: If people are tempted to do something as silly as protesting Nike by destroying merchandise they’ve already purchased, can I recommend donating it to Goodwill instead? For fark’s sake. If a tantrum must be thrown, at least make it a productive one.