Obama and the 2016 Olympics:
No good deed goes unpunished

The International Olympic Committee decided to hold the 2016 games in Rio Di Janiero, and Brazilians’ triumphant joy was exceeded only by the exuberant schadenfreude of America’s political right.

The New York Times heralded the reason: For Obama, an Unsuccessful Campaign.

Although Chicago might have lost to Rio de Janeiro for reasons that had little to do with Mr. Obama, the fact that he made himself the face of its bid invariably meant that its defeat would be taken as a stinging rejection of its favorite son.

Oh come on. The facts are few and simple.

A Chicago committee working to land the games and, specifically, Mayor Daley, urged President Obama to go to Copenhagen and make a pitch for the windy city. Obama obliged. He was only gone for a few hours, and learned Rio had been chosen on the way back.

Why Rio and not Chicago? We can think of a dozen reasons, but No. 1 is the fact the U.S. has hosted many Olympic games, while South America has yet to host any. No. 2 is that, after the U.S. financial industry sold toxic garbage to banks, investment outfits and individuals around the world while the U.S. government failed utterly to conduct proper oversight and regulation, triggering a global economic calamity, America is not in the world community’s good graces.

Our president, being a nice guy, wanted to do something to boost his adopted hometown. Hosting Olympic games means lots of jobs in the preparation and lots of tourists when the event gets under way. He acted on a very American notion: nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Desperate to drive up Obama’s negatives, as pols put it, the smear-and-jeer forces of the right are seizing on Obama’s lack of success in landing the games. There hasn’t been so much celebration in their ranks since George W. Bush won re-election in 2004.

Cheers erupt at Weekly Standard world headquarters,” wrote editor John McCormack in a post titled “Chicago Loses! Chicago Loses!”

The rest of the right-wing noise machine is cranking out propaganda much as Boeing cranked out bombers in World War II. Here’s Ed Morrissey of the aptly named Hot Air blog:

Let’s see. The White House jumped in front of a situation without understanding it, relying on the word of political cronies to shape their comprehension without checking for themselves. Only after they failed did they ask themselves about the political environment in which they made their proposal. Are we talking about ObamaCare, cap-and-trade, or the Olympics? It’s hard to tell.

Nonsense. Obama and his people weren’t obliged to spend weeks mastering the ins and outs of Olympics geopolitics. He went, he made his pitch, he headed home.

What’s going on here is that the media need, for their own purposes, to frame this episode in a dramatic way. The cynical dregs of Republican conservatism are grasping at every straw they can find or make up.

There’s nothing wrong with Obama and his White House. The problem is that much of America’s media and political class are grossly dysfunctional.