In this week’s Sports Illustrated, Bill Clinton, Honorary Chairman of the USA Bid Committee to bring the World Cup back to America in 2022, finally broke his silence. Avid American soccer fans – all twelve of them – demanded to know what the United States was doing to bring the famous tournament stateside. Seasoned followers of Bill Clinton won’t be surprised to find he was short on specifics, but long on warm and fuzzy platitudes assuring readers he cared, and that he was working behind the scenes to make it happen.
It is still unclear whether or not FIFA supplies Honorary Chairmen with interns. Regardless, Clinton failed. Miserably. Qatar beat out the United States today as host for the 2022 World Cup, and now female soccer fans, oddly enough, have Clinton to thank for having to dress conservatively in the not too distant future.
Although I’d much rather have Bill Clinton spending his post-presidential years globe trotting from stadium to stadium instead of writing anti-Israel screeds a la Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, someone still needs to address his liberalism, even if it’s in puff pieces for Sports Illustrated. Clinton writes:
…our nation, like the game, is more diverse than ever before. We have a fascinated mix of ethnicities and cultures within our borders. Players from every competing nation would feel as though they were playing a home game right here in the United States.
Liberal multi-culturalists might wish that to be true, but it’s not. And, while I thank Bill Clinton for reminding SI readers that liberalism seek to create a United States where Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Amadinejad’s national teams feel right at home, someone should have edited it out since it’s kind of nice when the home team has a home field advantage. I’m assuming that the magazine’s editors know that liberalism is like Swiss Cheese; plugging that hole would not have addressed others:
In our interdependent world we have to change our theory of success from a zero-sum game, where one team has to win while the other must lose. It’s good for sports, and makes for great World Cup matches, but it’s wrong for the world.
Ah, good old-fashioned liberal feel-goodery. Unfortunately, this is not tee-ball.
Once again, Clinton is wrong. Subscribing to the “we’re all winners” mentality creates nations high on self-esteem but low on credentials. Instead of raising the bar, liberals always seem to want to lower the ceiling. In short, in Clinton’s ideal world we’re actually all losers. Again, fitting since America lost its bid for the 2022 World Cup…to Qatar.
Competition is good. Just ask Larry Page or Sergy Brin, founders or Google. Or Bill Gates at Microsoft. Or Steve Jobs at Apple. The list of entrepreneurs who consistently raise the standard of living for millions of people around the globe demonstrate just how wrong our former President is. Even if Clinton was right, we would then have to ask what sort of symbolic message he was sending Kim Jong-Il years ago when he had Madeleine Albright give the dictator a Michael Jordan signed basketball. North Korea certainly seemed to be playing to win when it shelled South Koreans with artillery rounds. And they seemed to be playing to win when they received said basketball from the Clinton administration and rewarded the world with nuclear weapons and a bigger proliferation problem.
Someone needs to tell liberals that while free trade isn’t a zero-sum game, dealing with bad actors on the international stage often should be. I believe Ronald Reagan once said that the answer to dealing with the Soviets was simple: We win, they lose. Conservatives get this, while liberals like Bill Clinton want to make the North Korean soccer team (and their paid Chinese actors posing as fans) feel like they’re playing a home game in downtown Atlanta.
For someone who invented “triangulation”, Bill Clinton seems to have lost his touch. Without Dick Morris at his side he’s like a seventh grader who doesn’t know the difference between equilateral and obtuse triangles.
