The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

It didn’t take long for folks to formulate some comparison to Bush as several websites I visited over the weekend are comparing Obama’s push for the Olympics and Bush attending the Olympics.

“Stretch” ain’t even the word.

Let’s start with an article from The Politico back in May of this year.

“The Obama White House is playing an unprecedented role in the bid to bring the 2016 Summer Olympics to Chicago, with top adviser Valerie Jarrett spearheading an effort that draws on the international symbolism of his presidency.

Any president would have an interest in helping an American city win an Olympic bid. But none has been as closely associated with an Olympic proposal as Obama, and the emerging effort by the White House is unusually pointed in its attempt to wrap the campaign around the president and his appealing image abroad — a strategy veteran Olympics watchers say is paying dividends and could result in an enormous hometown farewell party if Obama wins a second term.”

Oh, it gets better.

“Chicago 2016 spokeswoman Mica Matsoff said that if Chicago wins its bid, Jarrett “would head a special office to provide top-level support to Chicago” by coordinating among federal agencies that might have a role in the Olympics — which would be a first for a U.S. administration.”

Jarrett had been vice chair of Chicago 2016, the $49 million nonprofit enterprise created in 2006 to lead the city’s bid. The group maintains deep ties to some of Obama’s closest backers, who are among its top officials and major financiers. as

Four of the five co-chairs of Obama’s inaugural committee have unpaid leadership roles in the Chicago bid, including Pat Ryan, the chairman and CEO of Chicago 2016; John Rodgers, the treasurer and director of Chicago 2016; Penny Pritzker, the hotel heiress who led Obama’s meteoric presidential campaign fundraising; and Bill Daley, the former Clinton administration commerce secretary and brother of the Chicago mayor.

White House social secretary Desiree Rogers, an Obama family friend, also served on the Chicago committee, which still counts Obama confidant and vacation companion Eric Whitaker among its members. Jarrett was replaced as vice chair by Martin Nesbitt, the treasurer of Obama’s campaign and another Obamaland fixture.

A.S.K. Public Strategies, the Chicago-based corporate public relations company founded by Obama political guru David Axelrod, has been paid “a nominal amount of money” by Chicago 2016 to do “communication management [and] communication planning,” said former Axelrod partner Eric Sedler.

In their appeals to the International Olympic Committee, Chicago boosters have leaned heavily on the symbolism of an Obama-led shift away from the globally unpopular policies of the Bush administration — the Chicago 2016 committee originally featured the slogan “Reaching for a Better World,” followed by “let friendship shine.”

So let’s recap:

Bush attends the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics and we are now comparing that to the unprecedented role of the Obama administration (as outlined above) for the 2016 Olympic games.

Second. The Obama administration and their supporters made their entire push for the Olympics about two things: The Obama legacy and Chicago (which just so happens to be the home of the same political machine that helped pushed him to the White House). But let’s just ignore all of that and say that he was doing it for America (right!).

Third. I thought the stimulus bill was supposed to help create/save jobs. So far, it hasn’t (except for government jobs).

Critics of the stimulus bill predicted that it would not do squat for the economy or job creation. But now some of those very same critics are now suggesting that it was “un-American” to hope the U.S. did not get the Olympic bid. Supposedly both centered around boosting the economy with one already failing at the attempt and the other historically amounting to a very large get rich quick scheme that will only leave Chicago further in the red and product it can barely use (“Beijing’s Olympic building boom becomes a bust“, “Athens’ deserted Games sites a warning to London Olympics“). So does this mean that these critics were also being “un-American” when they criticized the logic behind the stimulus bill? See how they folks paint themselves in a corner?

So the basic question that I have here is this:”If America has supposedly just been rescued from the brink of economic collapse, where was Obama planning on getting the money to host the Olympics?”

Two more points~

Obama’s own words:

“Obama said the United States was partly to blame because ‘there have been times where America’s shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive’ toward Europe.” (spoken before a town hall meeting he held back in April this year before a mix of French and German citizens)

Yet his administration and their push for the Olympics firmly believed that the world would just hand Chicago the games all because he was the first Black President, not because America is a great option. Arrogance personified.

Lastly, as web critics are busy redefining anti-Americanism while absolving themselves from the very same thing, they neglect to admit that their perfect example of pro-Americanism has them rooting against the second largest Black population outside of Africa (since we are going to engage in a war of political jargon). Brazil, let alone South America has never hosted the Olympic games. Even Africa has never hosted the Olympic games. Talk about unprecedented! And if there is to be any economic boost from these games, shouldn’t countries that are not as wealthy as the US experience that first (at least that is what I keep hearing)? So by rooting against a country that holds the second largest Black population in the world, does that now make these critics…racist? Does it make them elitist?

You figure that one out. In the meantime, I reaching for the motion sickness pills. This ever-changing logic is too dizzying to take serious or figure out.

Update: Let’s talk more about being un-American.

h/t: Ace. Full article found here.

“The larger question of the effect of the war on the region, America, and the world, however, is less clear-cut. And it is doubts about this question that have led many of us who oppose the war to that confused state of moral schizophrenia.

I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I’m not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.

Some of this is merely the result of pettiness — ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something trickier: It’s a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism not easy to discount, in which one’s head and one’s heart are at odds.

Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people. But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative — four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere?

Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world. It is based on the belief that every apparent good will turn into its opposite. ….Dialectical pessimism is the dirty little secret of the antiwar camp — dirty because there is something distasteful about wishing for bad outcomes when the future on which those wishes are based is unknown.”

But somehow wishing for breakdown in the political machine that looks out only for itself is being un-American. Little do these critics realize that they, too, have made this all about Obama, the first Black President. And they are only too anxious to point that out.

American prosperity has NEVER been centered around what the Olympics could bring. True, it does bring many investors, but America has been able to do that without the Olympics for decades. In the meantime,  we can judge a President who promised that unemployment would not go any higher than 8% (it’s now 17% according to this) after investing over a trillion dollars of treasure we simply did not have.