Thanks to Michael at Helio7 for pointing out what seems to me to be yet another amazing first set by our fearless leader: exploiting the Olypmic games for political purposes. Lawrence Donegan writes from Athens in The Guardian:
The advert, which has been broadcast in the US for the past week, begins with footage from the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, during which 13 Israeli athletes were killed by terrorists, and continues with a narrator saying: "Freedom is spreading through the world like a sunrise. And this Olympics there will be two more free nations and two less terrorist regimes." As the flags of Afghanistan and Iraq flutter in the breeze, it concludes: "With strength, resolve and courage, democracy will triumph over terror and hope will defeat hatred."
The Iraqi Athletes are irate:
The team's coach, Adnan Hamd, told Sports Illustrated magazine: "My problem is not with the American people. They are with what America has done; destroyed everything. The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the stadium and there are shootings on the road?"
The best part of the article is the glimpse we get of the team's Bush-Administration supplied media handlers:
To the embarrassment of their media handlers in Athens, members of the Iraqi football team have reacted furiously to the news that their efforts are being used to aid Mr Bush's efforts to win a second term in the White House.
...
Mark Clark, the spokesman for the Iraqi Olympic squad in Athens, accused journalists of taking advantage of the players. "They are not very sophisticated politically. Whoever posed these questions knew the answers would be negative. It is possible something was lost in translation. The players are entitled to their opinions but we are disappointed," he said.
Now, the summer Olympics always coincide with the rising momentum of the American presidential campaign. I don't recall George Bush I airing any ads about athletes from the newly freed nations of the Eastern Bloc or Panama during the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, nor Bill Clinton's commercials including footage of Bosnians participating in the 1996 Atlanta games. Please correct me if you definitively know of such ads; otherwise I think we can all assume that the Bush-Cheney campaign has managed to set another record low.
