The Whole Thing Sucks To High Heaven

I wasn't going to blog on the bloody Chinese putdown of the protests in Tibet because I have nothing to add but my sympathy for the Tibetan people, but I backslid here the other day and might as well go whole hog.

The State Department is quite obviously sending a signal to Beijing that it should try to tone things down a few notches because it wouldn't want to sully its most excellent relationship with another repressive regime – the Bush administration -- let alone dampen that old Olympic spirit.

Ah yes, that old Olympic spirit: Professionals masquerading as amateurs while ingesting the latest in performance-enhancing substances in the most crassly commercial sports orgy on the planet.

I thought that President Carter's call for a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a well-intentioned joke because the Olympics of yore that I loved as a youngster – the ones with earnest amateurs and nary of Coca-Cola sign to be seen – were already a thing of the past, so a boycott of the Beijing circus would be just as silly even if we had a president who knew what the moral high ground was, let alone occupy it.

My bottom line is that the whole thing sucks to high heaven: The Chinese government sucks. The U.S. government sucks. And the Olympics suck.

Cartoon by Moir/Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald