Geez, I can’t believe what I’m reading here. Where is your patriotism for your own country’s athletes? The Olympics has a long and honorable history. It is an athletic event, not a political one. It’s a time to put political differences aside mementarily and concentrate on the games. I love when our teams and individual athletes do well. I love it when they stand up to get their medals while our national anthem plays.
From what I read here on this thread, the true party poopers are those that won’t back their own country at the games, and who misplace their hostility for any given host country onto the athletes who have worked their tails off to get to the level of performance where they could make it to the Olympics. What a bunch of sour grapes with a bad case of misplaced antagonism. Our teams should never be punished for the sins of any host country, nor should our President use the Olympics to make political statements about any host country. They could reciprocate one day against our own country. Keep politics out of it, and stop sounding like the Dems always squawking about human rights abuses all over the world, including their favorite target, the good old USA. Ugh.
mementarily = momentarily, above. Typo.
I can’t believe you think the Olympics were invented for anything but politics ... and business profits.
I’m sure you would have demanded that FDR attend the Berlin Olympics using the same spurious reasoning.
The Hu Jintao clique that rules China today is identical to the Hitlerian clique that ruled Nazi Germany.
To paraphrase you - where is your pride in your country’s founding principles and its pursuit of freedom and liberty for oppressed peoples?
China is using these Games to project a positive image of themselves to the world. I consider it the duty of those who value freedom to use this opportunity to let otherwise unaware folks realize what a horrendous nation they really are. I just sent out some extremely graphic Tibet massacre pictures to my entire email contact list earlier today and I'm already getting responses to the effect of people will not be watching the Games as a result of this. Warms my heart.
Olympics: Seven years ago, while the selection process was still ongoing, we said that it would be a mistake for the Games to be awarded to Beijing. The Chinese have, unfortunately, confirmed our doubts.
But then Beijing was not a good choice.
• Athletes are being asked to compete in appalling environmental conditions. The city's poor air quality, as much a relic of decades of environmentally filthy communism as it is a sign of a burgeoning economy, could cause health problems for competitors.
• The government is censoring Internet usage by foreign journalists, an outrage the International Olympic Committee doesn't seem too concerned about.
• Beijing announced in June that "Not all of China is open to foreigners, and they shall not go to any venue not open to them." One of those venues "not open to them" is Tibet.