Sen. Barack Obama said he is conflicted about whether the U.S. should be a full participant in this summer’s Olympics in Beijing because of China’s human rights record.Awww. That reminds me of an old Coke commercial. Anyway, then I thought, who the heck cares? Ominously, Drew Sharp:
“I am of two minds about this,” the Democratic presidential hopeful said in an interview aired Wednesday on CBS’s “The Early Show.” “On the one hand, I think that what has happened in Tibet, China’s support for the Sudanese government in Darfur, is a real problem.”
Still, Obama said, “I am hesitant to make the Olympics a site of political protest because I think it’s partly about bringing the world together.”
Our state's worst sports writer goes on, naturally, to moralize about the evils of corporations, Big Macs, and Coca-Cola. Maybe he and Obama should chat.It's time for people to see the separation of sports and politics as it really is -- an Olympic myth.
And it's time the U.S. tells the Chinese government that it will not tolerate the heightened subjugation of government dissidents in the months leading up to biggest moment in recent Chinese history -- the Beijing Olympics.
And if it continues, the Americans must boycott the Games.
In any case, it's maybe not such a good idea for Obama's foreign policy to hearken back to Carter's. Jimmy Carter, of course, is our best ex-president (in the sense of having been the person most qualified to be made an ex-president) and the last president to boycott the Olympic Games. They were held in the Soviet Union; the USSR had just invaded Afghanistan. Carter figured, hey, the Soviets will probably feel really bad if we deprive our hard-working athletes, who have been waiting for this moment their whole lives, of the chance to earn an Olympic medal. So bad that they'll probably give up that whole war thing! It worked so well that Americans decided to give Carter a nice, long vacation and turned to Ronald Reagan to maybe finish the job. He, famously, armed the native Afghanis, leading to the USSR's demoralizing defeat there.
No one loves a good symbolic act more than liberals, but it's hard to say what exactly the effect is on Communist regimes, who have always tended to be ends-justify-the-means types. On the other hand, it's fairly easy to tell what the effect will be on American morale. Oh, good, no Olympic games for us this year. Guess we'll wait for our star tracksters to age another four years. Too bad there's only a short window for a lot of these players, who have remained amateurs solely to earn the Olympic gold, to compete at the highest level.
Of course, we notably slapped an infamous tyrant in the face during the Olympic Games in 1936, when black athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals on Aryan-supremacist Adolph Hitler's home court. But you're right; boycotting is much better.
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