We Listen To This Trash So You Don’t Have To

Today on the ever quietly smarmy Radio Netherlands there was a segment on that baaad, baaad US government’s baaad, baaad boycott on the 1980 Moscow Olympic games. Left to your imagination was the divine pursuit of the Tibetan cause and the present confused popular call to boycott the Beijing games, or at the very least the opening ceremony. This was left for the listener to piece together on their own because, as we all know, this just can’t be made openly complicated or difficult without embarrassing the listener with the idea that the dynamics of one boycott which CAN be looked down on would be compared to one that one simply SHOULDN’T.

The once boycotted athlete did make a fine point: there might be some interaction between politics and athletics, and at the outset he thought the cause of finding a non-violent way to send the CCCP a message was laudable, that it did nothing to remove the Red Army from Afghanistan. Tacit message: the boycott just amounted to so many empty words.

One name that went unmentioned when discussing that dastardly US Gubmint boycott, that thing so evil that it still deserves abuse, was that of the President who though it to be a non-violent but tough move: that of Jimmy Carter, the only US president who kept a boy’s name in adulthood.

His name did come up in the usual haze of progressive warmth when his recent meeting with Hamas’ head in Damascus came up. Don’t forget that it took 9 years of back-channel negotiation with the IRA to come to the table. That Hamas is nowhere near the point that there is anything to talk to them about, and that this whole play is to the aged hippies in the western audience seems to go un-mentioned. In fact in the sphere of the left-dominated “free” press, this kind of thing MUST either go unmentioned or in roundabout terms that bruise the feelings of the journo who might still in the back of their mind, think that they still need to write it.