Bloodthirsty Liberal

Uh-oh. Looks like Mr. and Mrs. Messiah aren’t too happy:

Best line I’ve heard so far: For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of the International Olympic Committee.

Distant runner up: My President went to Copenhagen, and all I got was this lousy Rio 2016 t-shirt.

I don’t really want to dance on Chicago’s grave, but I hope you’ll forgive me a quick buck and wing over President Obama’s mortally wounded hubris. (Who’m I kidding? That thing has nine lives at least.)

Aggie and Carol have both opined on why the IOC wafted a Gallic fart in the general direction of the Os (two Obamas and an Oprah). Aggie said the Olympians were unimpressed with the Obama’s criminal narcissism of pleading for the games for purely personal (read: self-absorbed) reasons. We Americans may act like you complete us, B-Ho, but the Europeans aren’t humping around all that guilt the way we are. They didn’t want to see the Olympic rings turned into O-O-O-O-Obama campaign signs. Carol saw a more cruel motive: pure humiliation. Make him wait, summon him to the foot of your throne, make him lick your velvet slippers, kick him in the nuts.

Well, who am I to argue with either irrefutable position? I write only to offer a few more.

The president can’t be surprised to learn that after all his bad-mouthing of America—most recently last week at the UN—that the rest of the world hasn’t heard. Who wants to grant the Olympic Games to such a faulty nation and a flawed people? The only games they know are war games. [Bleep] ‘em. At the very least the IOC heard that America is no better than any other nation, just a slightly bigger Vanuatu, a slightly wealthier Haiti. What’s America got to offer that Laos hasn’t?

Rooting for America is like rooting for the Yankees—or Man United for our European readers. We should all be happy that a remarkable city like Rio—a chocolate city, as Mayor Nagin coined the term—won. Certainly all liberals should. Buck up, progressives, and mark your calendars! Topless sunbathing may be a sport in 2016.

It wasn’t bad enough to turn on NBC and see the waxy visage of the greatest mass murderer in the history of the world, Mao, over the left shoulder of Bob Costas for the past two weeks.

Now we have the BBC waxing poetic about the “humanity” of the Taliban:

A BBC news girl attacked TV yesterday for failing to show viewers the Taliban’s “humanity”.

…

Asked what was missing in media coverage, she said: “It may sound odd but the humanity of the Taliban, because they are a wide, very diverse group of people.”

Canadian-born Doucet, 49, told the Edinburgh TV festival: “Some would like to talk to the British Government. Some of them don’t want to be fighting British troops. Some of them would. This is the ideological Taliban.”

The article goes on to report that the Taliban want to demonstrate their humanity by capturing a British soldier and skinning him alive.

BTW, since when is a 49-year-old woman with fifteen years experiece at the network a “BBC news girl”? This the the UK’s Sun newspaper, so allowances have to be made. At least she wasn’t topless. And their outrage is still justified.

Back to NBC for a minute. I tried to find an online picture of Mao hovering over Costas’s shoulder, but NBC isn’t letting them out apparently. They may have been happy to broadcast the image to hundreds of millions night after night, but they evidently don’t want to be reminded of it.

Wish I could take credit for the title, but it’s Rick Reilly’s from ESPN.

As a matter of fact, I can’t improve on anything he did, so let me just cut and paste a sample for you:

Even if I couldn’t make it fit, I still had to share it with you. It’s that good.

And it’s symbolic of the whole Chinese enterprise, from wonton soup to lychee nuts.

Not that China isn’t an economic powerhouse the likes of which the world has never seen. But it has accomplished its cosmic expansion at the cost of everything—everything—I said everything—we have come to hold dear. Individual liberty? Don’t make me laugh. Care for the environment? They don’t even pretend. Honesty and fair play? So Western, so bourgeois.

What do you care if the buildings are fake or real? If the fireworks are computer generated? If the 16-year-olds are actually 14? We gave you a good show. You like our General Gau’s chicken, and that’s got enough sodium and fat to stop the heart of a rhinoceros. So now you want to know the truth?

It is probably the vestigial liberal core still resent in my DNA or in my reptilian brain, but I expect justice in this world. Go ahead, laugh. It must be the mellowness from my vacation talking.

What was I just saying?

Two elderly Chinese women who applied to hold a protest during the Olympics were ordered to spend a year in a labor camp, a relative said Wednesday. Police later squelched a pro-Tibet demonstration.

The women were still at home three days after being officially notified they would have to serve a yearlong term of reeducation through labor, but were under surveillance by a government-backed neighborhood group, said Li Xuehui, the son of one of the women.

Li said no cause was given for the order to imprison his 79-year-old mother, Wu Dianyuan, and her neighbor Wang Xiuying, 77.

“Wang Xiuying is almost blind and disabled. What sort of re-education through labor can she serve?” Li said in a telephone interview. “But they can also be taken away at any time.”

Come on, baby, go for the gold! You can do it! Higher… higher… HIGHER!!!

A defiant gray pall hung over Beijing on Thursday, one day ahead of the official start of the Summer Olympic Games, and the city’s air-pollution index continued to inch up, as it has all week, despite a series of dramatic measures intended to cut contamination.

Chinese officials, the head of the International Olympic Committee and some athletes tried to play down concerns about air pollution. IOC Chairman Jacques Rogge called the haze “fog” and said that it wouldn’t harm athletes.

But the city’s air-pollution index stood at levels that were more than six times what the World Health Organization recommends for long-term exposure.

I want hurdlers getting stuck in midair, I want marathoners to get lost in the miasma, I want sprinters dropping on the track, gasping for something that passes for air, I want bloody vomit and scabrous rashes, I want the whole damn city to dissolve in its own moral and physical corruption—the ghosts of Tianamen must be avenged!

How’s that for Olympic spirit?

Claudia Rossett looks forward to the Beijing Olympics with a few memories of Beijing past.

Nineteen years have passed, but as one of the eye-witnesses in the Beijing streets and in Tiananmen Square itself to that night of June 3-4, 1989, I look at this map and in memory can still hear the first cracks of the bullets, feel the treads of armored personnel carriers shaking the pavement, and see the people looking grimly at the advancing rows of helmets, silhouetted against the burning roadblocks. They were clutching bricks and bottles against the guns of their own country’s army. I remember a young man I saw closeup, shot in the chest, one of seven with bullet wounds I saw carried to a makeshift medical tent at the north end of Tiananmen Square during the final hours — and wonder if any of them are named in this document. I remember the demonstrators sitting in the spring breeze, shortly before dawn, on the steps of the monument to China’s Revolutionary Heroes, surrounded on three sides by tens of thousands of soldiers in the final standoff in Tiananmen Square — and facing off against the huge portrait of Mao, the white Goddess of Liberty statue that stood in Tiananmen for less than a week before China’s rulers knocked it down.

Here’s the account I filed that June 4th, recording what I had witnessed, and trying to answer my editor’s question, what does it mean? “The Party Pulls the Trigger.”

In that 1989 article, in the closing paragraph, I tried to set down something that still applies today; not least as visitors to Beijing survey the massive security efforts, not all of which are intended strictly to protect the Olympics:

“No doubt when the Chinese government has finished dealing with its people, the tidy square will be presented again as a suitable site for tourists, visiting dignitaries and the Chinese public to come honor the heroes of China’s glorious revolution. It will be important then to remember the heroes of 1989, the people who cried out so many times these past six weeks, ‘Tell the world what we want. Tell the truth about China.’ “

I guess the world didn’t listen very well: China was awarded the Olympics. In response to which news Ms. Rossett wrote:

“…Trying to imagine the Olympic torch lit in Beijing, I keep remembering another torch, put there not at the behest of the communist regime, but by the protesters who nearly 12 years ago rose up by the millions to defy China’s tyranny. It was the torch held in both hands by the Chinese Goddess of Democracy — patterned after our Statue of Liberty — that for almost a week stood in Tiananmen Square, until it was destroyed by government troops on June 4, 1989.

When that symbolic flame of freedom can be safely lit again in China, it will be fitting to award Beijing the Olympic Games. Until then, the Olympics can better keep faith with human dignity — especially that of the Chinese people — by going somewhere else.”

Oops.

For those Olympic tourists too young to remember where all the bodies lie, she helpfully offers the Tianamen Massacre Map. You can’t tell the slayers without a scorecard.

I may get into these Olympic Games after all. How often do you get a chance to watch a marathoner come down with black lung?

Less than two weeks before the Olympics, Beijing’s skies are so murky and polluted that the authorities are considering emergency measures during the Games beyond the traffic restrictions and factory shutdowns that, so far, have failed to clear the air, state media reported on Monday.

For the past five days, Beijing has been a soupy caldron of humid, gray skies. Local pollution ratings have exceeded the national standard for acceptable air since last Thursday, despite a temporary air pollution control plan that began on July 20.

Or what if a sprinter can’t see the end of the track, and loses his way? How great would it be to see a drug-enhanced thoroughbred burst through the murals the government have plastered everywhere to hide the gray gloom of the city?

I can just see (well, not see, but imagine) a javelin getting stuck—in the air.

Olympic athletes testing positive for oxygen will be summarily disqualified.