Go Away, Condi
Now that Condoleeza Rice has come to New York to say what a great place this would be to host the 2012 Olympics, my enthusiasm for New York doing so has just diminished.
Certainly the Olympics would do many fine things for this city. But there's no place in New York for the kind of jingoistic, America
uber alles attitude of Rice and her compatriots in the Bush administration. The Republicans already came here for their political convention. We were good hosts, I think and hope, but let's face it: New York City and the Republican party don't have much in common. We're tolerant. They're not. We're diverse. They're not. We live comfortably alongside people from other nations. They want to conquer other nations. Especially the ones they know nothing about.
Okay, I'm being hyperbolic. But people on both sides of this line can concede that New York was a very odd place to host the GOP convention.
In fact, the only reason the convention was held here to was to turn Ground Zero and memories of 9/11 into a political advertisement.
That's exactly what the Republicans would want to do with the Olympics, and that's why Condoleeza Rice came here.
The people of this city—people from all over the world—are a great reason to have the Olympics in New York. Would the Bush administration really understand anything about that?
