Jose Canseco...or is it his twin?

Mere Ethics Dunce is an inadequate title for former baseball slugger Jose Canseco, somehow. He has dabbled in extortion and assault, but his real contribution to making the world worse was serving as a one-man steroid epidemic, using the performance-enhancing, testicle shrinking drugs himself to win an American League  Most Valuable Player award, then making sure that as many players as possible on the various teams he played with used them too.

After he could no longer play, Canseco claimed he had been “blackballed,'” which is a little bit true, since everyone in the sport was sick of dealing with him and regarded him as a sleazebag. Canseco vowed revenge on Major League Baseball, and got it by writing two books in which he fingered the players he had taught to cheat for cheating by using steroids.

The book actually accomplished some good, prompting baseball to finally get serious about testing for banned performance enhancing drugs; a perfect example, in fact, of why beneficial results don’t retroactively make vicious, unethical conduct ethical. Given a second shot at notoriety, Canseco parlayed it into a new career as a co-star on several B and C level reality shows, peaking this spring by being a contestant on Donald Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice,” competeing with the likes of fellow walking disasters Gary Busey and LaToya Jackson.

Jose is a quadruple threat: he’s a brute, he’s a narcissistic egomaniac, he’s dumb as a box of syringes, and he has the ethical sensitivity of the bastard offspring of Herman Goering and Rosie Ruiz.

But I still didn’t think he would stoop this low.

Jose, you see, has an identical twin, Ozzie, who never made it to baseball stardom but who otherwise is just as smart and principled as Jose.Well, a promoter offered Jose $10,000 to come to a casino in Hollywood, Florida and be a fighter in an exhibition boxing match against Danny Bonaduce or Lindsay Lohan or some other desperate attention junkie.  Jose wanted the money, but had a schedule conflict.

So he sent Ozzie, pretending to be Jose. Just like “The Parent Trap.” Just like “The Patty Duke Show.” Except this was real, not a Disney movie, and Jose and Ozzie are not little girls. Of course, being unethical but also morons, the Canseco boys didn’t think about tha fact that Jose has some tattoos that Ozzie doesn’t, and thus the jig was up the second Ozzie got into the ring.

How dishonest, how petty, how completely untrustworthy does someone over the age of 16 have to be to try such a stupid scam? Why, as dishonest, petty and untrustworthy as Jose Canseco, of course—a deserving member of the Ethics Dunce Hall of Fame!