Defending the Russian Olympic Committee

ONE WOULD BE HARD PUT to determine the greatest cheater, the Russian government, the New England Patriots, cocaine dealers in mid town Manhattan, or French tax payers. Early returns indicate the Russians have a sizable lead, but its still early, and the summer Olympics are still fresh in memory. Most amazing is the incredible list of pathetic excuses slewing forth from the Russian Olympic committee to explain the presence of performance enhancing drugs in every member of the Russian Olympic contingent: "The problem is a matter of individual choice, mere indiscretions of youth, and is neither systemic nor endemic. Other nations do the same thing, Turkey, Kenya, the Islamic state, among others". Never mind that bad behavior is not justified by pointing to other bad behavior by someone else. These people are masters of excuse mongering. "The mainstream American liberal media has grossly overstated the problem. A rampaging pack of feral Siberian huskies devoured every piece of drug testing equipment in the country." And the list goes on. No American prep school student body ever generated a more impressive litany of lame, pathetic denials of responsibility. No other conclusion is possible than that the term "integrity" is foreign to every official organization in Russia. One is sorely tempted to place more faith in the parental role modeling and moral rectitude of Bill Cosby than anything officially Russian. But of course, this is a country with a rich tradition of deception, with past leaders named "Ivan the Terrible", "Joe Steel", and "Vladimir the Impaler". Ivan used to pluck the feathers from the wings of pigeons, cast them off a Kremlin tower, and time their descent, just for sport. Joseph "man of steel" Stalin murdered thirty million of his subjects for the great crime of disagreeing with his domestic policies, then told the world that the apparent disappearance of so many people was directly attributable to improved efficiency in the communist economic system, resulting in vast numbers of hard working citizens spending more time in their happy offices and factories, and thus only seeming to have vanished. Without American spies, the world would never have known of the presence of Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba, concentration camps in Siberia, or the militarization of the Soviet space program, so, why should we be surprised? With all this history, who cares that a few hundred Russian athletes showed up bench pressing five hundred pounds with each arm, or running a kilometer in less than three minutes?........WE HOPE TO ENCOURAGE ORIGINAL, CREATIVE WRITING BY EXPANDING OUR WEBSITE AND OUR READERSHIP. PLEASE SHARE THIS SITE WITH A FRIEND!