Bro Deal said:
I would think there would be a fairly good correlation among the people who are informed about the sport. The casual fans and general public are unaware of the rampant drug use, but anyone who follows cycling and has more than two brain cells to rub together has to know what all the top guys are doing. To continue to show blind support for Armstrong indicates that there is some sort of cognitive dissonance.
I think it is tied up with what has become an american belief, that the ends justify the means. That used to be a knock against the communists; it was held up as why the U.S. was better than the marxist regimes. Not anymore. Now if you question the costs or morality of what the administration is doing, you are unamerican and maybe a traitor as well. Armstrong displays the same "with us or against us" attitude of the neocons and he also shares their pleasure at taking petty revenge on those he perceives to be his enemies.
I find it hard to see how someone can disapprove of traits of Dubya and then excuse the same traits in Armstrong.
I support and admire Lance because I have a realistic view of the world:
1) Most if not all top athletes probably use drugs, in all sports. If one genetically gifted person uses drugs, then the others must to compete. In my opinion creating rules and then not enforcing them properly is ********. That's telling people:
-"Ok, here are the rules: don't do this *some action*"
-"But if you don't do it we will never know. "
-"Oh and by the way, if you actually follow these rules that we can't enforce, you will not be able to be a professional athlete even though you've spent your entire life working toward this goal."
I really don't care that i'm going to get flamed for this. This is reality.
2) The vast majority of allegations against professional athletes are never fully proven. In my eyes Lance was never proven without a doubt to have doped. I believe Tyler was proven and a few others, but not Lance, not Jan, not Ivan, etc While it's highly likely that they did, I can't say for sure, and no matter how much you yell about it, neither can you ("you" meaning anybody).
3) With or without doping I truly admire what Lance did. No matter how much people call him a cheat, I truly admire that he came back from almost certain death due to cancer ravaging his entire body and absolutely dominated the greatest event in cycling for 7 years straight on a
level playing field. Don't even begin to tell me that he doped but those other guys were clean. He did it on a level playing field.
Now what is Lance using his power for? He's using it to fight cancer. I see Lance clearly. I sure as hell don't "blindly" support him. He's a truly incredible athlete that uses his power for good. We'll see what he does if/when he gets into politics, but for now I admire him.
Bush and his cronies on the other hand are using their power to do terrible things. They are waging war on the American people as well as other parts of the world. They are terror mongering and lying to us about who attacked us, saying Iraq had something to do with it when in reality the majority of the attackers were from Saudi Arabi and the funding organization was based in Afganistan (which has become the side show, rather than the main event, for some unknown reason) They are taking away our most basic civil rights. They are telling us that they are fighting the terrorists, and yet in reality they are doing the terrorists' work for them: they are taking away our freedoms. A couple weeks ago, Bush signed a law which suspended habeus corpus FOR US CITIZENS. It's bad enough that they could "legally" detain foreign citizens without a trial, now the administration can even detain American citizens indefinetly without a trial, and without even having a charge placed against them - they can "legally" disapear you if they want for any arbitrary reason. They are sending us off to war to die for their money laundering scheme. And they are doing an even worse job governing things in Iraq than Sadam did. Why? Because they want chaos in iraq. Iraq has a lot of oil, and in chaos they can steal. Haliburton, with their no-bid contract to "rebuild Iraq" is over there doing god-knows-what. It's all ******** and it's all evil and selfish. Now the bushies are shaking their fists and N Korea and Iran. So much damage being caused to the US and the world. Terrorists have failed to scare me, yet I am afraid of my own government. What does that say about how they are running things?
You're saying that supporting Bush is similar to supporting an amazing athlete who spends his time raising money to fight cancer and trying to strongarm our government into getting off their asses and do something about the nation's #1 killer (cancer) instead of wasting their ****ing time arguing over gay marriage?