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An Epic Fail For All Seasons

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Since Charli has noted the ways in which Marc Thiessen is wrong in ways that are grossly immoral and dangerous for national security, I’ll note that like so many modern Republicans he seems to take pride in being wrong about everything, even stuff that there’s no logical reason for conservatives to be wrong about.    Take the very first manifestation of his all too explicable gig with Fred Hiatt:

Something has been lost since the U.S. started sending professional athletes to the Olympics — first with the basketball “dream team” in 1992, which crushed the competition on the way to the gold, and then with hockey in 1998. Now, National Hockey League executives are reportedly debating whether to continue their Olympic commitment beyond the Vancouver Games. For the sake of hockey fans and for the sake of the NHL, the answer should be no.

According to the ratings, even many of you who aren’t otherwise hockey fans watched at the Olympics.   Would anybody have preferred watching a bunch of semi-pros rather than the greatest players in the world?  Anybody?  Didn’t think so.

And just as as he’s  apparently willing to make torture-justifying arguments in public that in a more rational universe would be confined to blog comment sections (“the fact that a few military personnel submit to torture as part of torture resistance training proves that inflicting the seem techniques on other people isn’t torture!”), note that in a mere two sentences he manages to pack in at least two glaring logical and/or empirical errors.   The comparison with hoops in transparently specious, because there’s a much, much more even distribution of talent in (men’s) hockey.   Canada (which has yet to win a medal outside of North America since the NHL blessedly started letting its players compete in the Olympics) doesn’t have anything like the dominant position that the U.S. has in basketball, and 5 or 6 teams could have won hockey gold with it being only a mild upset at most.    And the nostalgic longing for the game at which Al Michaels personally tore down the Berlin Wall is even dumber, because the Miracle on Ice was thrilling because the Soviets were allowed to play a team full of world-class professionals, many of them Hall of Fame caliber.  If you think that one country’s semi-pros and college kids playing someone else’s could generate similar excitement, I have some shares in a network that plans to broadcast the Spengler Cup in American primetime to sell you.

Being this wrong all the time about everything is an impressive achievement, in its way.

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