Baseball should investigate President George W. Bush. What’s that you say? It could never happen? WMDs, Katrina, Guantanamo, wiretapping and Abu Ghraib all are higher in priority? Hmmm. That is a good point.

The president can’t be expected to spend all his time answering questions for past hiccups. He is, after all, only one man, and there are only so many hours in the day. Nevertheless, when the federal government has washed its hands of Orwellian ineptness, baseball should have no choice but to (sorry) step up to the plate.

No matter if it’s baseball or politics these days, a single question is at the crux of the conversation: What did Bush know and when did he know it? The response for anything political depends on the ideological leanings of whomever is doing the answering. But baseball is different. This is not a question of party loyalty. We already know baseball is morally bankrupt, that the past 15-plus years are tainted with steroid abuse and lies. What’s left to ask of baseball is just how perverse were you? What lengths did men in suits, not men in uniform, take to trick the American people?

“Game of Shadows,” the impressive book retelling Barry Bonds’ involvement with steroids has, in Commissioner Bud Selig’s mind, left him no choice but to hold an “investigation.” "Nothing is more important to me than the integrity of the game of baseball,” says the morally obtuse Selig. What a joke. The conclusion former-U.S. Senator George Mitchell offers should be thrown into the garbage. First, because steroid use is only being looked at starting with the 2002 season. Second, to understand the whole story, Selig and his band of lowlife owners have to be included in a colonoscopy going back 20 years.

Scandals have two sides, public and private. The public faces – Bonds and Sheffield and Sosa and McGwire – do not deserve our sympathy. They also shouldn’t be overly vilified. It is easy to attach blame -- as the league and many journalists are trying to do -- on the public face of the problem. Let’s put an asterisk by their names in the record books, is one response. Don’t let them in the Hall of Fame, is another. Ban them for life! Please.

Punishing their accomplishments is to act in an intellectual vacuum: As far as we know, everyone was juicing, everyone around the league knew about it, so there’s no point in singling out the individual for institutional corruption. (If an owner knew Player A was using steroids and still gave him a huge contract, is that not the same as telling Player B there are no rules against steroid use?) Taking that stand is the only logical choice given baseball’s complete lack of accountability. For this most recent era, players and the league are assumed guilty until proven innocent.

And proving innocence is tied to the men who write the checks more than to the specific players who were doping. The owners, to varying degrees, condoned and facilitated illegal steroid use – just because league rules didn’t ban it doesn’t mean jail time wasn’t an option. So, owners must be pressed onto the examining table. Without them, this is your typical dog and pony show; give Americans just enough to feel satisfied while those in power, the real crooks, sit silently in their luxury boxes.

“Investigations” by institutions seeking to punish their own are more about protecting the powerful than seeking the truth. When international pressure forced the Pentagon to investigate Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, only the soldiers directly involved with the torture were scrutinized. Their superiors were left alone. It’s a lot cleaner and safer for the Pentagon (and president) to make Lynndie England the poster-child for wrongdoing (made even easier with her posing for pictures).

The same is happening in baseball. Bonds is expendable if his guilt saves the sport – and the owners who’ve put it at risk. A businessman knows what he’s selling. In baseball we are talking about a billion-dollar industry – this isn’t a game – that was in economic jeopardy in the late 80s and early 90s, and placed on life-support after the strike in ‘94. The league turned to home run derby as a solution. Thousands of articles were written to explain the offensive explosion: smaller ballparks, poorer pitching, better hitting, doctored baseballs, a smaller strike zone, and, of course, steroid use. All could have been factors, but I’m putting my money on the last one. If you listen to Jose Canseco, who right now sounds like the only sane person in the room (frightening, I know), the sport was infested with abuse; he’s said as many as half the players were doping. This could only happen with tacit approval from the league.

Here’s where we get back to Bush. During last year’s State of the Union, the president called out baseball’s players for using steroids, destroying the game’s rectitude, and setting a bad example for kids.

In a great and distinguished pantheon of hypocritical presidential statements, this has top-five potential: Bush was owner of the Texas Rangers before gubernatorial politics came calling. He was owner of a team known for mashing home runs, one Canseco says had a clubhouse doubling as a pharmaceutical lab, with Ivan Rodriguez, Juan Gonzalez and Rafael Palmeiro being the most prominent abusers.

We all know Palmeiro’s story. He waved his finger at congressmen and then promptly went out and failed a steroid test. For his stupidity and utter arrogance, Palmeiro has been publicly water-boarded. Next up is Bonds and whomever else the “investigation” decides is guilty.

A sports journalist has called Canseco a modern day Bob Woodward. Wrong. In this Watergate analogy, Canseco is not Woodward. He is Deep Throat; participant turned whistle-blower. Given that baseball and Mitchell’s “investigation” is not about to tell us how much league officials and owners really knew, a modern-day Woodward is needed – a journalist who will uncover what people knew and when they knew it. I’m not hopeful this will happen. Not after seeing baseball-journalists sit back and spoon-feed the corporate line to the public for almost two decades.

Instead, we’re going to be treated like children, presented a fairytale by Mitchell, in which Bonds and the players are monsters and Bush and the other owners acted benevolently, knowing nothing about the product they were pedaling.

Nathan Carlile is a columnist for Atomic Sports Media. Additionally, he is a reporter for Legal Times and a freelance writer. He received his master's degree from Syracuse University and resides in Washington D.C. Nathan can be reached at nate.carlile@atomicsportsmedia.com.