Is John Kerry really the best person to be taking this issue on?

Thank God for U.S. Senators taking on the tough problems facing the nation. High oil prices? No. Hunger? No. The skyrocketing price of healthcare? No, again. We’re talking a MAJOR issue: The NFL Network not being available to two-thirds of cable subscribers.

Thankfully, Senator John F. Kerry (D – Mass) is not letting this travesty continue. He’s sent a letter to National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell and President and CEO of National Cable & Telecommunications Association Kyle McSlarrow begging them to put aside their differences and get the NFL Network on every TV in the land.

By all means, let’s keep the war unfunded while we take this football TV issue head on. Tough, strong, and just plain patriotic. I mean, Patriotic.

As the senator’s letter makes clear, this is mostly a local issue for him and that’s why he wrote the letter. The Patriots’ last game of the regular season is on NFL Network, so the senator gets involved to make it look like he’s doing something useful, yada yada yada.

Now, you may recall, I complained last week that the Cowboys-Packers game was only on NFL Network, but my complaint wasn’t a call for any politician to step in and fix it. When politicians do that, they almost always screw things up. Look at what they’re doing to open wi-fi in the name of “protecting the children.” When I complained, I was a customer complaining about a couple of commercial entities, in this case the NFL and my cable provider. And then I found out that I could watch the game on NFL.com, so I watched the second half online and stopped complaining. Patriots fans can do the same.

If cable providers and the NFL can’t work this out, they’ll hear about it from customers. If they don’t fix it, there will be a backlash. This is one of the few ways the NFL can annoy its fan base on a national scale, so they have an incentive to fix the problem. I’m not entirely confident that they will, but I do think they will.