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Oh, No, The Olympics!

One of the strangest lines of attack against Obama that I have seen this year has to be the talk radio-inspired meme that Obama’s travel to the IOC meeting in Copenhagen is some kind of outrage or a case of dereliction of duty. Gingrich has joined in, complaining that Obama has more pressing matters to […]

One of the strangest lines of attack against Obama that I have seen this year has to be the talk radio-inspired meme that Obama’s travel to the IOC meeting in Copenhagen is some kind of outrage or a case of dereliction of duty. Gingrich has joined in, complaining that Obama has more pressing matters to attend to, the talk radio legions are dutifully repeating how offended they are that Obama has gone to Denmark, and even Ruben Navarette felt compelled to add to the endless whining:

If you want to see Obama get passionate in pursuit of an international cause, you’ll have to go to Copenhagen, where the president and first lady this week will lobby the International Olympic Committee to pick their home city of Chicago to host the 2016 Olympics.

One might think that we could stand to have a President with fewer passionate international pursuits after the last one’s enthusiastic pursuit of dangerous and destructive causes, but can someone explain to me what exactly the substantive objection to Obama’s Copenhagen visit is? One could argue that that bringing the Olympics to Chicago will ultimately be bad for Chicago by requiring the city to take on unnecessary debt or by subjecting the city to years of construction and upheaval, but on the whole this has not been the complaint.

More important, why are his domestic critics upset that he is taking time away from his domestic agenda to push for Chicago’s bid? Shouldn’t his critics be pleased if he is wasting time and not pushing for health care legislation? If he had not gone, it would have taken about five minutes for the same critics to declare that Obama had “thrown Chicago under the bus,” or that the “citizen of the world” had no loyalty to his adopted hometown, or that Obama really wanted the non-American candidate cities to have a better chance, no doubt because he is, as Navarette absurdly claims, “ambivalent about America’s role as the world’s one great superpower.” Should Chicago not win the ’16 Games, and if the IOC chooses Rio instead, we will undoubtedly hear the same people complaining that Obama failed to get the Olympics in the United States because he is “ambivalent about America’s role as the world’s one great superpower.” It wouldn’t be true in either case, but that hasn’t seemed to stop any of these people so far.

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