I had originally wanted to make a longer, more thought-out post about this, but I'm heading to St. Louis this weekend and I didn't want to leave you without content for so long since the site has been down for the past few days.

Unless you've been living under a rock without a TV or access to Google, you'll know that the Olympics ended on Sunday (despite Google's inexplicable olympic header image today) with our men's basketball team getting a bronze medal and embarassing themselves by losing 3 games. Based on an ESPN.com internet poll (the most reliable means of divining public opinion since flipping a coin), the majority of internet-savvy Americans were rooting against the men's team.

Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock wrote a scathing attack on everyone who voted "yes" in this poll, calling them racist and unpatriotic. Apparently the reason people didn't support these olympians had nothing to do with the fact that they were arrogant (refusing to live in the Olympic Village with the other athletes), pompous (skipping practice) millionaires who played without heart. Instead, it's because they were successful and black.

I don't know how to put this, but Whitlock is a dope. Put a white guy on the team and they still would have lost. They still would have lived in their own little mini-mansions, reverted to trying ridiculous alley-oops the minute they had a 1 point lead, and gotten pounded by teams who actually cared about playing. I still would have rooted against them because they didn't deserve to win.

It may surprise the oodles of sports columnists who keep trying to drag this into a black vs. white thing, but most sports fans don't really care about skin color as long as they help their team win. Pokey Reese is black and plays baseball in a city that, according to another dope Barry Bonds, is "still racist", yet he gets standing ovations for his defense even though he hits .240. Chiefs receiver/runback specialist Dante Hall is black, yet countless white programmers at work have his picture as their computer background.

And the "unpatriotic" part is just ludicrous, a product of Bush's America, where if you don't drape your pickup truck in American flags and decals of Calvin peeing on Saddam Hussein you're not "supporting our troops". Apparently as Americans we should support arrogant millionaires because to the rest of the world we are a bunch of arrogant millionaires.