Fred Barnes has put himself in the running for the 2009 Hand-Chafing Award with his latest column on Obama’s failure to single-handedly obtain the 2016 Olympics for the city of Chicago. He starts by declaring that holding the Olympics isn’t in the national interest. He doesn’t explain why, but given our job-loss situation, he really ought to. This country needs jobs, and we’ll take them any way we can find them.
Then Barnes asserts that the president should never ask for anything on the international stage unless he is already assured that his wishes will be fulfilled. That’s kind of like telling Derek Jeter that he shouldn’t step into the batter’s box unless he knows that he’s going to get a hit.
Somehow Barnes thinks that a failure to persuade the IOC to do his bidding means that Obama lacks the skills to get anyone else to cooperate in international affairs.
Finally, Barnes wants the press to draw all these same conclusions or else they will prove they’re just in love with the president and unwilling to criticize him.
Let me ask you something. If it is this easy to get paid a good salary on the right, shouldn’t I just switch teams?
Personally I think the Olympics is just a mess of corporate commercial bullshit. I probably wouldn’t attend them even if I got a free ticket. Yet as a devoted Chicagoan I’m devastated at the defeat of all our efforts. We’ll presumably never know what went on in the minds of the deciders, and it seems evident that the major determinant was giving South America its first Olympics.
Still, I’m really hating on asses like Barnes today, as well as some of our local “lefties” of the kind that have to bitch about everything that isn’t guaranteed to give jobs to the poor. The motives of the celebrating wingnuts are crystal clear: it’s supposedly a defeat for Obama. We’re used to that.
I find the preachy sanctimony of some lefties far more dispiriting. These are the kind of folks who bring down every good time by serially reminding us that the people in Biafra or New Orleans or in doorways in Chicago don’t have good times, and we have no right to them either until we’ve made the world just and perfect. Never mind that had we won, there would have been a new spirit in the land, the kind of optimism and pride that leads to bringing ideas into economic and material reality. We’re supposed to join the marxy puritans walking the single track that bypasses imagination and rigidly rejects the pleasures of fleeting joy. We’re too smart for frivolity.
Neither side changed the outcome, but they did manage to justify the slapping we got. It’s necessary to “reach out” to the puritan left, but today I have to wonder if the deal is worth the time.
Year ain’t ovah yet, Boo.
(Which ain’t saying much.)
As John Cole and now Charles Johnson learned, shoveling the bullshit never ends. If you have any intellectual curiosity and regard for the truth, forget it. Only the dumb and crazy survive the long haul.
got a a price in mind…aside from your soul?
some things, money can’t buy or salve…that’s one of them.
Yeah, I dunno. What does Barnes make? I’ll take that. And I’ll do a better job, too.
I’ve said this for a while – the day I become a Republican wil be the day that I give up on America. Basically, “F y’all, I’m out for self.” That’s what it takes to become a Republican.
Well look, ideally that WOULD be what happens. But the world doesn’t work that way and sometimes you just have to take the risk. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t and it’s not like this hurts Obama internationally in any meaningful way.
I think this is going to end up like a non-offensive Schiavo–people will look at the GOP carrying on and their response will be “WTF?”
Whereupon some harsh blast criticism in a more moderate Grayson-esque (Stoller-esque) style could really make people tune them out as a group.
How is this different from the people who erupted in cheers when the Twin Towers collapsed?
If you go out and walk around, how many people pay attention to the right wing nonsense about the Olympics?
The right gets too much attention by the msm and makes it seem that there are so many more of them than there are.
Unless you can totally detach from reality for long periods of time and be able to write at the same time, stay on our side.
We’d miss you, Boo.
I wonder at what point the truly insane righties get boring for even cable tv.
As reported yesterday on NPR via the BBC, the difficulty involved in travel into the US was the real issue for the IOC voters as far as Chicago is concerned.
The irony is, if the Olympics were somehow key to producing jobs, the Federal stimulus money would, by law, have been prohibited from being spent on any stadia or swimming pools or the Olympics.
Fred Barnes!!!! Seriously!!!!! Fred Barnes!!! The guy is whack job and a Faux news bullshit artist. The guy belongs in a sanitarium.