Thank goodness Team USA pulled victory from the jaws of defeat on the last day of Olympics competition and just squeaked past China in the gold-medal tally.
That solitary extra gold almost made up for all the full-blown wokery that embarrassed the nation and ensured the TV ratings were a shocker. Almost.
Newsflash: Americans don’t want to watch athletes who hate America representing America.
Kneeling and gesturing, turning your back on the flag and disrespecting the national anthem is gross, self-indulgent and moronic.
That’s why Americans switched off. NBC’s prime-time ratings were down by about half overall — with 49 percent fewer viewers compared to the 2016 Rio Games, and 53 percent down from the 2012 London Olympics, Fox News reported.
The numbers were so dismal that NBC reportedly has had to promise advertisers freebies to make up for the dud profits.
The reasons were spelled out in a Monmouth University Poll which found 41 percent of Americans had no interest at all in the Games, and another 43 percent had only “a little” interest, with Republicans, independents and men the most disaffected.
More than a third of people polled July 26 blamed woke politics for their lack of interest in this year’s Olympics compared with past Games. Specifically, they were upset with athletes using the international platform to express political views and disrespect their country.
“The people we sent over aren’t representing the country. They’re kneeling at the flag,” said a Maryland man in his 40s, who votes independent.
“I don’t want to see virtue signaling. Be a proud American,” said a 45-year-old New Jersey woman, also an independent.
It’s pretty simple. Viewers aren’t masochists. They simply won’t watch their beloved country be kicked in the teeth by people who have been given the great privilege of representing it, at taxpayer expense.
Some sports commentators were just as bad. ESPN’s William Rhoden, for instance, told “CBS This Morning” he couldn’t enjoy the opening ceremony because the American flag reminded him of the Capitol riot.
“I saw a lot of, you know, US flags,” he said. Well, thank you, Captain Obvious.
“Please don’t make the Olympics into the Oscars,” Bill Maher begged on his HBO show, halfway through the Games. Too late. The “get-woke-go-broke” adage holds again.
In the inimitable words of Donald Trump: “If our soccer team, headed by a radical group of Leftist Maniacs, wasn’t woke, they would have won the Gold medal instead of the Bronze. Woke means you lose, everything that is woke goes bad, and our soccer team certainly has . . . They should replace the wokesters with Patriots and start winning again. The woman with the purple hair played terribly and spends too much time thinking about Radical Left politics and not doing her job!”
The woman with the purple hair, Megan Rapinoe, captain of the US women’s soccer team, who is a gold medalist at kneeling, retorted: “You’re rooting for people to do bad? Yikes.”
But it’s not that. No one wanted the American team to lose. It’s just when they act like losers it’s difficult to watch.
They were the ones who strove to represent the USA on the international stage. No one held a gun to their head. Why bother if they are so contemptuous of the country that has given them its greatest honor?
Go find a country more to their liking. I hear Qatar is handing out citizenship to athletes. Just overlook the fact that women are second-class citizens there, homosexuality is illegal and free speech is nonexistent.
When athletes are obsessed with whatever identity niche they’ve backed themselves into at the expense of showcasing America, everybody suffers. They forget to focus on winning and lose resilience. Suddenly they’re focusing inward and suffering mental-health problems, pulling out of competitions and making basic errors.
Were the Chinese ambivalent about their flag? How about the Australians, the British, the Japanese?
It’s sort of admirable that America is big enough to put up with the contemptuous self-loathing. Americans are freer than anyone in the world to say and do whatever they like, but when freedom cluelessly turns against itself, it can become a liability.
In any case, after a pandemic, it’s just not what people back home needed.
But we can learn a lesson from the Woke-Olympics.
The athletes who were patriots united the nation. Their love for country tugged at the coldest heartstrings and brought a tear to the driest eye. It was like rain in a drought, bread to a starving man, all in all a blessed relief.
The pure radiant joy of Tamyra Mensah-Stock was infectious. After becoming the first female black American wrestler to win Olympic gold, she wrapped herself in the flag and exclaimed, “I love representing the US, I freaking love living here.”
She is grateful and that makes her happy, not a sour-faced sad sack like most of the wokesters. She’s suffered real adversity, but hasn’t used it as an excuse for failure. Her father died in a car accident when she was 15, on his way home from watching one of her matches. Now she says she will use her winnings to buy her battling widowed mother the food truck she has always wanted. What a role model!
The same goes for the unnoticed bulk of patriotic athletes, such as Sydney McLaughlin and Dalilah Muhammad.
Bravo. They went against the cultural tide and did their country proud. And in the end, despite the odds, America prevailed.
Pathetic Pelosi
It doesn’t get more hilarious than the sight of a wistful Nancy Pelosi trailing around Martha’s Vineyard after being dumped from Barack Obama’s birthday-bash guest list. You can almost hear her channeling Greta Thunberg: “How dare you!”
The frozen expression on her face tells you she just can’t believe the insult. Her, Fancy Nancy, the nation’s most powerful woman, disinvited?
So, she flew into the island on her private jet, anyway, and skulked around crossly, telling anyone who asked that she had “other parties” to go to. Sure, lady!
So shameless is the House speaker that she positioned herself in the clubhouse of the Vineyard Haven Country Club on Saturday so she might accidentally-on-purpose bump into the former president at the precise moment when he walked off the golf course, in the hope of shaming him into reinviting her to his scaled-down 60th.
But nope. Awkward as it was when he caught her baleful eyes upon him, to his eternal credit Obama held firm. Happy birthday, Mr. President. You’ve earned it!
USAF shows the Army how to do it
A fantastic recruitment ad for the Air Force puts the Army’s joke, woke, animated, emasculated efforts to shame.
What makes it even better is that the star of the show, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “C.Q.” Brown, actually came up with the concept and the script on his own.
He is in the first frame, seated in a hangar, wearing camouflage, leaning into the camera, deep voice booming: “When I’m flying, I put my helmet on, my visor down, my mask up,” he says, over a drum beat with images of fighter jets soaring and machine guns blazing.
“You don’t know who I am, whether I’m African American, Asian American, Hispanic, white, male or female. You just know I’m an American airman [strategic pause] kicking your butt.”
So good. That’s a warrior worth following.