And Now We Enter Stage Five

Of Bad Project Management.

The search for scapegoats.

During what will undoubtedly be one of the looooongest plane-rides home in history...

From the Guardian UK:

Olympics 2016: Chicago stunned after Olympics snub

The people of Chicago were stunned today to learn that their city was eliminated in the first round of voting in the contest to host the 2016 Olympics.

Conservatives jeered the president, saying he had demeaned his office by acting as a pitchman for his hometown while the country struggles with a sagging economy, Congress debates healthcare reform, and generals in Afghanistan await a strategic review.

"We've got troops dying in Afghanistan, and instead of making a decision whether we're going to send in more troops... the president is spending his time making a failed bid to the Olympic committee," said conservative strategist Jordan Sekulow. "It comes at a very bad time for the president: The American people saw him spending his time pitching the Olympics instead of meeting with the generals and making decisions."

"It's going to be a black eye," said David Johnson, a Republican strategist. "It's going to be something that Republicans are going to be able to use against him probably in the next few weeks and in the coming campaign."

But senior Obama adviser David Axelrod, himself a Chicagoan, said the same conservative critics would have blasted the president if he had stayed home.

"The IOC has its own politics that transcend these things," he said, "and we simply couldn't overcome them."

In Chicago, thousands of residents crowded into the city's Daley Plaza anticipating a celebration let out a collective gasp at the news. Even those who were ultimately sceptical about the Chicago bid were shocked to learn the city did not even make the first cut.

"I've never really had a disappointment like this," Ken Rudd, a 33-year-old salesman, told the Associated Press in Chicago, as the dumbfounded crowd slowly filed out of the plaza. "This is one of the saddest things I've ever seen."

First, Axelrod is right: nothing short of cutting the tax rates for billionaires to negative 17 followed by his spontaneous combustion will get President Obama anything other ranting hysteria from the meatsticks who run the GOP. It is President Obama's existence itself that is an unbearable horror to them, regardless of which series of loud, incoherent screechy sounds are being used this week to manifest it aloud.

Second, Mr. President, where the fuck was your whip count?

Third, once it had come this far, this became America's bid. And however much I or anyone may have righteously criticized the shady way it was put together, the possibly illegal way it was staffed, or the "None Of Your Damn Business" shell game the Bid Committee played with the financing and oversight...I have that luxury because I am a private citizen. A private citizen and proud Chicagoan who, had we won, would have hoped for the best, worked hard to hold my government accountable, and learned "'the Bean is located two streets down and to the left' in a dozen different languages."

But as Public Servant Number One, the President of the United States has an entirely different set of duties and obligations, which include doing things like flying overseas for a day to pitch the U. S. of A.

Fourth, remember that Republicans who think the President of the United States flying overseas for a day to pitch the U. S. of A. is somehow a grievous dereliction of duty are the same Republicans who were apparently too busy masturbating themselves blind to "Atlas Shrugged"


to notice that President Stupid routinely refused to bestir himself from one of his record-breaking number of Jack Daniels Stay-cations even when the world was falling apart around him.

Because the most important lesson of the Olympics -- good sportsmanship -- is a virtue long absent from the infrared end of the American political spectrum.

And last, if this really is "one of the saddest things" Mr. Ken Rudd has ever seen, then Mr. Ken Rudd is in for a whole lot of heartbreak in this life.