Citius, Altius, Stupidius.
The size of the Valium it's going to take to calm Senator Huckleberry down is growing by the hour. Pretty soon, you're going to need a flatbed to get it from the pharmacy to his house. Today's high-sterics involve Edward Snowden, who is currently residing in the PGA Tour shop in a Moscow Airport because the United States government is turning itself into a pretzel trying to bring him back for trial. Against this effort, Vladimir Putin, as would any good former KGB goon, is jerking the United States around. Senator Huckleberry now proposes that we become even more publicly frantic and cancel our participation in a big figure skating meet to convince him.
Graham said the move would put pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to change his ways. "I love the Olympics, but I hate what the Russian government is doing throughout the world," Graham told NBC News. "If they give asylum to a person who I believe has committed treason against the United States, that's taking it to a new level."
Luckily, "treason" is not defined by how Graham thinks the word will play in South Carolina, where they know from treason, let me tell you. But Huckleberry isn't finished with his turn on the stage here at Bad Historical Analogy Theater. He goes sailing past the Cold War and right to an even worse example.
Graham also pointed to the Olympics in Nazi Germany as an example of when governments need to take a stand. "If you could go back in time, would you have allowed Adolf Hitler to host the Olympics in Germany?" Graham said, clarifying he was not saying Russia was the same as the Nazis, but that Olympic hosts need to be responsible world players.
The United States hosted the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984, when the US government was sponsoring terrorism in Central America, and getting ready to finance said terrorism by selling weaponry to the terrorist-sponsoring mullahs in Iran. Not that it's the same or anything, responsible-world-player-wise.
Look, we tried this once before, in 1980, in one of the most authentically dumb acts of Jimmy Carter's presidency. Not only did his boycott of the Moscow Olympics not hurt the Games, it didn't slow down the Russian war-making in Afghanistan a whit. And it caused a tit-for-tat in which virtually the entire Soviet bloc boycotted the aforementioned Olympics in L.A. And that was the Summer Olympics, about which many more Americans actually care. Outside of the pixies on ice, the US could boycott the Winter Olympics from now until the end of time, and a decent majority of Americans wouldn't even notice.
But, back then, at least there was an actual war, with people dying and all. This is one guy, who released some documents, many of which were not as earth-shattering as his fans would like to believe, who's penned up in an airport with no particular place to go, and Graham wants to ratchet up the international political hysteria to an even more deafening pitch. When is it going to dawn on these people that, if you want to diminish Edward Snowden's impact, just ignore him and leave him where he is? He's not a traitor. He's not the Nazis, or the godless Commies. He's a hacker with a cause. This is getting embarrassing.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
