Vote for your Olympic Games Host

On the contrary. I believe you have amply demonstrated your great affection for pretentious verbosity .... crude and vulgar I will agree, but pretentious and needlessly redundant nonetheless.

Christ on a bike.

Rio! It's Rio!

Thank you, wandeljw. A light heart is always a welcome thing.

"Needlessly redundant" is redundant.

Try again, silly.

Yeah, I guess you're right. Nobody expected Chicago to win...

Oh wait...



Looks like you're wrong again.

But i didn't say that no one expected Chicago to win. Indeed it was obvious from the context that Obama and his supporters did indeed expect Chicago to win. My point was - and is - that no thoughtful, discerning person, aware of either the recent history of game hosts, the selection criteria, and the competition should have expected Chicago's selection. So much for the wisdom of crowds.

I thought Rio was the favorite from the start, but I don't know why you wouldn't consider Chicago as a strong candidate. They had promised that the majority of the athletes would be within 15 minutes from their venues, a strong plus for the IOC. By 2016, it would have been 20 years since a US summer games. Compare that to Europe where Greece has recently hosted and London is coming up. (Of course Salt Lake City hosted the winter games.) The Chicago committee had committed to using existing infrastructure to support the games, another IOC plus. Despite your feelings about government corruption, the IOC doesn't really care about that (Greece again plus Salt Lake City bribery). What the IOC does care about is money and Chicago would likely yield top dollar for broadcast rights. I think the Rio argument about having an Olympics in South America is very compelling even with the extreme crime there, so they won, but I don't see why a "thoughtful, discerning person" would have assumed that Chicago was a long shot.

When you look through the -international- papers of the weeks then you'll notice that Chicago was seen by most as favourite (as was Paris, before).

I'd read folks very familiar with the process say that Rio and Chicago were the favorites, and that Tokyo was the long shot because the last one was in Asia.

But I don't really get your attempt to make partisan political hay about this at all anyway.

Are you one of those thoughtful, discerning persons?

I was shocked that Chicago was booted so early in the process. Locals here (Dubuque) even expected a spill over effect. I'm bummed, man. (Wow, I haven't used that expression for, what, 40 years? Jeezus, I'm old.)

How did you guess !

I find it truly remarkable that anyone expected yet anouther U. S. venue for the games given Brazil's recent rise in world affairs; the recent economic crisis; the general resentment for dominant powers; and even the history of fast-track public works projects in Chicago.

You may be correct in your assessment. I suspect that all of the star power may have overshadowed our kind of town. Chicago don't need no celebrities. It is a great place on its own.

No intention here to knock Chicago. I agree it is in many ways a great place. I just don't think the fairly obvious external factors concerning any U.S. site were favorable this year, while all of those same factors strongly favored the bid from Brazil. Moreover the very substantial recent public exposure of the rather dark side of Chicago politics certainly didn't help. My essential point was that this was a telling miscalculation on the part of a president who just may have become a consumer of his own rather heated propaganda. it is not an unusual failing among charismatic figures, surrounded by overenthusiastic supporters.

Really, it was just a shot in the dark, considering there's no evidence that you were so thoughtful and discerning before the vote in Copenhagen. I'm sure you were equally prescient regarding the 9/11 attacks, the fall of Lehman Bros., and the Tampa Bay Rays winning the 2008 American League pennant. Perhaps you'd also like to tell us of all the other things that have already happened that you were able to predict with such amazingly accurate hindsight.

Just a guy supporting his home town. I don't read more into it than that.

No, I can't claim to have foretold all those events. However I was among a fairly large group of retired military folks who wrote to the Secretary of Defense in late 2000 concerning the alarming pattern of attacks on the WTC in NY, two of our embassies in east Africa; the bombing of our barracks in Saudi Arabia and the then recent attack on USS Cole in Yemen. I suffered along with almost everyone fromn the financial collapse, however I did feel uneasy enough in September 2007 to shift about half of my investments into more secure bond and cash funds. Not all of these moves paid off, but I did considferably limit the damage. I don't follow professional sports.

In short I'm not a gifted predictor of the future. However, I am discerning enough to have some sense of major trends. Not a particularly unusual record, but not all bad.

Where were these same military retirees when it came to the analysis of the bogus data that began the Iraq war?

Noone was prescient except Mr Ritter , and he was summarily "Traitorized" by the right.

Guessing, and somet imes guessingcorrectly happens to all of us.

And so like most people who criticize Obama's decision to go to Copenhagen, you're actually much better at retrodiction than you are at prediction. I'm not surprised.

Well, I don't know "most people who criticize Obama's decision to go to Copenhagen" so I won't generalize. Moreover it seems to me that you are making precisely the same prejudgement of my motives of which you seem to accuse me with respect to the president.

In fact I didn't criticize or attempt to guess his motives. Instead I noted that this was an inauspicious year for the first ever direct appeal by a U. S. President to the IOC on this matter, and the political calculus - both for himself and the nation - should have led him to make a different choice.

This was knowable before the announcement of his trip. My first reaction to learning of his trip was surprise that he would do such a thing and a degree of continuing discomfort with the evident presumption among his admirers and some of the media that the intervention of his star quality will again produce magical results. (That it doesn't quite meet their exaggerated expectations is becoming increasingly evident.)

There is nearly always a U.S. city in the finals for the Olympic games. Since 1990 U.S. cities have hosted have hosted two of the last twelve olympic events (winter & summer) - that's well above average by any rational count.

Now that the threat of the former Soviet Empire is gone, the impression of an unchallenged superpower changes what may have once been widespread support to unease and resentment for the unchallenged elephant in the room. We both know that circumstance is changing, but the psychology of it is an observable fact in the contemporary world, and this is something particularly refelcted in things like the Olympics.

Given its rapid ascent to prominence in the world and its unique combination of political and economic success on its continent, the moment was predictably ripe for Brazil. Moreover president da Silva has rather successfully positioned himself and his country as an admired symbol for emerging nations from what was once called the "third world".

The spectacle of the fall of the Former governor of Illinois and all the attendant reminders of a truly unusual level of political venality there didn't help either.

I doubt very much that, had our president seen the situation this way he would have chosen to make the trip. That he didn't. makes me wonder about his judgement. Earlier I suggested that this was somewhat like a lawyer with a weak case anf the prospect of encountering a hostile jury deciding to go to trial anway - an error of judgement. I believe the analogy is apt, and that its applicability was fairly obvious before the IOC result was known.