Shhhhhhhhh. I’m listening for all the mea culpas, the abject apologies from media, politicians and moronic members of the general populace who were pushing Andrew Cuomo for sainthood.

Where’s lightweight brother “Fredo” Chris Cuomo, the CNN shill for his brother, now that Andrew has announced he will resign – finally – as governor of New York? Fredo is on vacation, a bit of convenient timing.

But what of the other Andrew Cuomo apologists who ignored his misguided COVID-19 nursing home policy, and gave similar short shrift to a lengthy list of females who had accused Andrew of creepy sexual harassment?

How about the cretins who broke tradition (read rules) and got him an Emmy for COVID-19 briefings that were mostly exercises in self-congratulation and blame shifting?

This tinpot dictator can’t even exit the stage without giving himself a 14-day curtain call. His resignation announcement was short on taking responsibility and long on blowing his own horn.

It wasn’t that long ago that a poll found that more than 50 percent of Hollywood types identified themselves as Cuomosexuals, a fawning tribute to a man with feet of clay.

There was talk of Cuomo hopping into the presidential fray in the next election cycle since it’s obvious current officeholder Joe Biden is unlikely even to remember who he is by then, not that this isn’t already a problem.

The only negative to this day is that there aren’t a lot of other prominent Democrats — or Republicans for that matter — with glaring shortcomings similar to Andrew Cuomo’s also being shoved out of the public spotlight.

No doubt Cuomo will land on his feed. Is that CNN on line 2? Maybe MSNBC? There will be other books to be written, corporate boards to be served upon. Maybe he will start up one of those questionable foundations to keep his name in the spotlight.

Bottom line, Andrew Cuomo’s shortcomings appear to go well beyond his admitted penchant for kissing and hugging, which he took great pains to document with an 86-page response to an investigation into his behavior. Only 26 of those pages were text. The rest were collages of Cuomo kissing and hugging men and women.

As some have noted, it’s an interesting defense to sexual harassment allegations for a person to say, in effect, that it’s just something that he does, a lot.

Now that Cuomo no longer will be burdened by those pesky governor duties, he’s free to devote full time to his favorite avocation.

Good luck with that, Andrew. Say hi to Fredo for us.

This just in, we’re all going to die – eventually.

Come to grips with this and life becomes less scary. Then you don’t become obsessed with prolonging your time spent on this spinning ball of chaos, at the expense of enjoying said time.

I’m not advocating diving out of airplanes sans parachute or jumping in front of buses. I also am not advocating sitting at home, cocooned in shrink wrap, wearing a face mask and inhaling vitamin supplements between jabs of the vaccine of the moment.

Somewhere in between is the sweet spot that few seem able to find.

The topic sprang to mind as I sat waiting for a NASCAR truck race at Watkins Glen to finish Saturday afternoon. It sits in a red-flag delay as I type due to lightning in the area.

The odds of any of the vehicles or crew members being struck by lightning should the race continue are infinitesimal. Similarly, odds are good no spectators will take a hit, presuming they do not stand in an open area holding a flagpole and wearing the metal spikes that help turn golfers into lightning rods.

But, in an abundance of caution, a phrase we hear a lot in these litigious and fear-mongering times, the vehicles sit waiting for Mother Nature to move on to other parts.

It wasn’t always this way, and I can speak from personal experience. Four or more decades back, a cousin and I used to make periodic pilgrimages to Watkins Glen to watch racing that sometimes involved a guy we both knew running in the Trans Am series.

On one of those occasions, we were watching a Formula 5000 race – think Indy-style open-wheel cars powered by domestic V-8 engines with a 305-cubic inch limit. These class cars ran from 1968 through 1982.

It began to rain – hard. There was thunder and lightning. The racers’ response was to pit for rain tires, the grooved examples that road racers use to run in the wet. The event continued.

Meanwhile, my cousin and I sat at the top of ALUMINUM !!! bleachers, maybe 50 rows high, situated on a hill, and watched the race.

If you are familiar at all with the Watkins Glen track, we were at the end of the uphill stretch that leads to the Esses, the back straight, and the bus stop (interloop) that slows cars ahead of the sweeping carousel turn.

Al Unser Sr. was leading the race and was clocked at 180 mph in the traps near the end of the back straight. This at a time when due to the rain and the rooster tails of spray shot into the air by the open wheels, you could only the see the front of the lead car and nothing of the trailing vehicles.

As for my cousin and I, we sat on the potential mass electric chair and thought little of personal danger. Only afterward did we give it any notice.

We might have died from a lightning strike, but we didn’t. I might die from COVID-19, but I like my odds there, too.

The hysteria of the pro-vaccine crowd and Orwellian governments only strengthens my resolve.

Their rush to censor anyone who would cite counter opinion smacks of desperation.

Just this past Friday Joe Rogan, speaking on his wildly popular Spotify podcast, mentioned getting feedback from doctors citing concerns that ineffective vaccines, such as the ones we are encouraged to take, can spawn super bugs.

Rogan mentioned a 2015 peer-reviewed study that raised the specter of this in general, not regarding COVID-19, which was a few years in our future.

And the cries are out to cancel Rogan and deny him his platform. He must be punished for being – in a word — correct.

You can’t be allowed to pass on correct information when it differs from the government approved narrative.

The nanny state purports to want to save us from ourselves with vaccines that don’t prevent infection or its spread, don’t kill the disease and now seem to be in need of a nonstop amount of boosters to maintain that ineffectiveness.

Had my cousin and I been at Watkins Glen today, NASCAR would have played the governmental role by saving us from ourselves. First, NASCAR halted the race with a red flag due to lightning, then it called it off 11 laps short of the scheduled distance.

Whether NASCAR was looking to protect the spectators, avoid lawsuits, just clear the decks for the upcoming race at the same track in the more popular Xfinity series, or vacate the cable channel for scheduled Major League Baseball, is open to debate.

What is not open to debate is you and I will die at some future time. Try ignoring the fear merchants along the way and living a little while you wait.

Times get curioser and curioser, producing a crying need for analysis.

Dry those tears, we have yet another edition of news and views.

NEWS: New York City has upped the ante for vaccination discrimination, closing gyms and restaurants to the unwashed, AKA unvaccinated. Expect other liberal citadels to follow and even get more draconian on the people unwilling to take the jab like good little sheep.

VIEWS: There is a mounting pushback movement regarding such governmental over-reaches. A favorite point that is being made more and more is the hypocrisy of requiring vaccination “papers” to go out and eat at a restaurant, while screaming that anyone suggesting voters should provide ID is a racist pig trying to discriminate against people. By the way, non-whites are disproportionately not vaccinated. Similar hypocrisy is opening the southern border and forbidding anyone even to ask an illegal alien about vaccinations.

NEWS: Bigwigs in the Democratic party, including figurehead president Joe Biden, are calling on tainted New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to resign as his alleged sexual misconduct continues to be documented. Cuomo, the one-time hero of the left for his ridiculous handling of the COVID-19 panic in the early days, won’t leave voluntarily.

VIEWS: Just one question: Is Andrew still getting unbiased guidance from little brother Fredo, I mean Chris, the CNN shill masquerading as a journalist?

NEWS: Tamyra Mensah-Stock is getting a lot of positive publicity, and deservedly so, for becoming the first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal in wrestling for the United States, then enthusiastically praising her home country and literally wrapping herself in the U.S. Flag afterward.

VIEWS: This is an athlete a country can cheer for, unlike so many of the virtue-signaling political activists who have sought to use any success in these Games as a political platform. Fortunately, U.S. women’s hammer thrower Gwen Berry embarrassed herself in competition by finishing 11^th of 12 participants in her event, thereby denying her a medal win and chance to embarrass herself further with pathetic symbolic protests such as turning her back on the national anthem.

NEWS: Former president Barack Obama has gotten criticism of late, even from some of his lapdog media members, for a planned 60^th birthday party at a Martha’s Vineyard mansion that would have had upwards of 700 people including guests and staff, even as we are being told to avoid gatherings in yet another COVID-19 scare campaign. Also there has been pushback against Obama for a social media effort by one of his sycophants to raise money for a look-at-me presidential center to fawn over Obama.

VIEWS: I’m surprised (sarcasm) that Obama’s party is at a mansion on the east coast and not being hosted in the South Side of his beloved Chicago, where dodging stray gunfire might have livened up the occasion. The Obama folks have pared the invite list in a bit of virtue signaling to the critics, but haven’t given specifics on the new numbers. I think Obama should be able to invite thousands to his party, but I also think the little people such as me shouldn’t have to walk around with face diapers and listening to threats if we continue to opt not to take the jabs that still are unapproved by the FDA, have proven to be ineffective, and are possibly dangerous as measured by the ongoing protection of manufacturers from legal action in the event of adverse reactions suffered by those who get the vaccines.

Traditionally, the military and the Woke movement would be the strangest of mates; philosophical matter and anti-matter.

But these are not traditional times and so we have the Woke crowd invading the military and doing their best to neuter one of the last bastions of uncompromised strength in this nation.

This is the same Woke movement that has turned our government into an exercise in socialistic excess, our public schools and colleges into cesspools of intolerance and indoctrination, social media into Big Brother censorship, our news media into fawning propagandists and our election system into a banana republic joke.

Now, at a time when China poses a significant military threat and Russia, while not the all-encompassing bogeyman the liberals would have you believe it to be, still represents a military existential threat to the west, we have the Woke fanatics threatening to turn our military into bands of introspective apologists.

Alas, successful military does not have as its cornerstone touchy-feely navel gazing. Militaries exist to kill people and break things in the name of national defense, or conquest, depending on the prevailing philosophy of the leadership.

In a Woke world, American soldiers would take to the battlefield bragging about their sexual, racial and ideological diversity and seek dialogue to find common ground with the foes. After enemy soldiers got done laughing, those intolerant meanies would send our soldiers back home in body bags.

And we among the civilian population would need to start brushing up on Chinese or Russian.

Reports have been appearing in the media for months now of how the military, at the behest of the political administration and with some well-placed stooges that have been put in positions of influence in the various branches, has been riding the train to Woke-ville.

Traditional military types, dinosaurs who actually believe in God and country, are heading out the door so fast it looks like the inverse of our southern border after Biden issues another ridiculous invitation to come on in, no COVID-19 testing required.

Of course the military brass – the same ones pushing this Woke philosophy — deny the descent into Woke-ism even as the proponents are previewing maternity uniforms, and adding socialist and other deviant philosophical material to required reading and education.

But while denying the reality of the matter, these idiots are issuing statements such as: “There’s strength in diversity; that’s a scientifically proven fact.”

I’d like to see that science. Somehow this country was the key to success in World War I and World War II despite not having women or admitted gays, transsexuals or the gender confused, in the combat units. Our military wasn’t concerned first and foremost with making sure it had enough representation of each racial and ethnic group so it “Looked like America.”

Results mattered then, not appearances. These days it’s all about the superficial.

Again, show me the “science” that diversity as defined by Woke loyalists makes a military better. This statement sounds suspiciously like the pseudo-science being crammed down our throats regarding COVID-19 (just ignore the fact that the death rate is about one quarter of one percent) and climate change (neatly re-branded from “global warming” when temperatures failed to climb at a rate that followed those made up hockey stick charts).

It is disconcerting to read that the military is going politically correct. I reached out for some first-hand feedback and I’m sad to report hearing that the situation is dire, perhaps even worse than what you might have read.

Our government, and the special-interest groups it takes orders from, have us in a race to see whether we can lose our freedom and independence more quickly from governmental decrees or from the nation being taken down by a foreign power.

Either way, we lose.

It was a good 24 hours for those who find these Woke Olympic Games disgusting.

Include me in that group, which surprisingly includes dependable far-left mouthpiece Bill Maher. He unexpectedly spouted at length recently on his cable television show that the Olympics are not the place for this ridiculous Woke crap. Maher would like to cancel Cancel Culture.

Can this be a sign that this hypocritical and sanctimonious politically correct over-reach has peaked? We can only hope.

The Olympic Games, once a sporting showcase, now have become a repetitive exercise in virtue-signaling, political posturing and personal promotion with a bit of competition slipped into the cracks.

Our women’s soccer team has a troll-like waif with color-of-the-day hair who has perfected self-promotion to an art-form, reaping financial benefits along the way and never being called out for her hypocrisy.

Yes, there is no I in team. But there is a Me (letters four and two reversed). Too many of these Woke Olympics athletes are ME types.

But, as these opportunists sought to bastardize the platform of the Olympics to advance their politics and purse, a funny thing happened. They haven’t been winning.

The women’s soccer team fittingly lost to Canada by hanging yet another zero on the scoreboard.

Rejoice that the U.S. women’s soccer team has been kicked to the curb yet again and now the best these over-hyped political activists can hope for is a bronze medal. Not that long ago they were odds-on favorites to grab gold, literally and figuratively when you include talk about endorsements.

Those post-match tears likely were more over lost dollars than a lost contest.

When an athlete’s focus is on something other than the competition, bad things happen. Or good things happen if you get a chuckle from seeing such people getting their comeuppance.

Losing has become of a habit for U.S. women’s soccer players. They lost in court, too, with their suit alleging they are underpaid. The court found they actually make more than the U.S. men’s players when benefits are factored in. Plus, the women were offered the very same contract as the men and turned it down.

For them to lose in a court of law in these politically-correct, warped-justice times speaks to the weakness of their case. And now their weak on-field play isn’t exactly strengthening their appeal.

Shortly before the women lost to Canada in the Olympics, the U.S. men’s team took gold in the CONCACAF Gold Cup by stunning heavily favored Mexico.

Meanwhile a New Zealand transgender weightlifter – translation, a former guy now trying to beat the girls – bombed out of that Olympic competition and shall depart Tokyo without a medal, and the ability to leverage that as a social justice warrior.

To repeat a line from a former post on this matter: Just lose, baby!

Through a combination of bribes and coercion, the VacinNazis and MaskHoles are neatly ignoring the facts, the science, as they push for their holy grail of 100 percent submission to the needle and the wearing of face diapers.

Clueless Joe Biden continues to jabber about the jabs and assured all during a recent appearance that those who got the COVID-19 vaccine wouldn’t have to worry about ever being infected.

But a recent outbreak in one Massachusetts county revealed that a full 74 percent of the new cases were fully vaccinated and 80 percent of those hospitalized were vaccinated.

There are similar numbers elsewhere that contradict even the walked back talking points that, yes, vaccinated people can be infected, but their symptoms are less severe.

Doing their part to serve their governmental masters, social media outlets such as Twitter are busy censoring those who report the results of a Pfizer study in which that company’s vaccine had zero effect on mortality. There were 15 people in the study who received the vaccine and still died, while 14 who received the placebo (AKA a fake to fool them) died.

The overall death rate from COVID-19 has been reported consistently as a minuscule percentage. One recent article I read put it at one-quarter of one percent of the infected. Looking at the glass as almost completely full, that means 99.7 percent or so of people who are infected DID NOT DIE!

Yet the drumbeat has been increased for all to submit to the vaccines, jabs that even the purveyors concede do not work completely, might need periodic repeat booster shots and are dispensed with the manufacturers shielded from any liability for adverse reactions.

Tactics of paying people to submit to the vaccine pushers, or threatening them with exclusion from society if they refuse to be stuck, smacks of desperation on the part of the powers-that-be.

The sheeple among society, those who will do as they are told without questioning – a variation of the Germans who exterminated Jews because they were “just following orders” – have rushed to get their jabs and now walk around in a state of orgasmic self-congratulation.

But that group has gotten its fix. Others are not so willing to be blindly obedient.

And I am reminded of a scene I witnessed last week at the Bedford County Fair in which there was a booth set up in one building offering free jabs. The woman sat there idly with no takers.

Right next to her was a merchandise vendor, prominently displaying Trump flags and posters. That booth was very busy.

International news agency Reuters reports that on Saturday 200,000 or so protesters took to the streets in Paris and other French cities to protest so-called COVID passports, a requirement that people have proof of vaccination before accessing public venues.

Your papers, please.

Other nations, including Australia, are seeing widespread protests as independent thinkers question this usurpation of freedom and the ongoing general power grab by their governments.

One can only wonder how next these governments, so desperate to repress the citizenry, will up the ante in an attempt to use the so-called “crisis” of the COVID virus to crush freedom and turn this world into one complete dystopian, dysfunctional mess.

Be assured it will continue until enough people hit the streets to demand it all stop.

1. TV ratings are in the toilet. They were down about 33 percent for the opening ceremonies and have continued to be tepid for most broadcasts. Some apologists note streaming opportunities cut into TV ratings, but even counting those platforms, far fewer people are watching these Woke Olympics in the U.S., and we congratulate them for their good taste.
2. The ratings flop is all the more notable because network and cable competitors have gone out of their way to clear the decks for NBC’s coverage by scheduling re-runs and other stale programming. Even NASCAR and Indy Car are not having races. Only the Major League Baseball broadcasts go on and those are scant competition in view of that sport’s similarly poor TV ratings, exemplified by the recent All-Star Game broadcast that plumbed long-term lows for viewership.
3. U.S. female gymnast, Simone Biles, promoted as the GOAT of her sport (Greatest Of All Time) became a metaphorical goat of a different kind by choosing to sit out decisive competition due to what she described as mental issues. Support poured in on social media, including from former U.S. Women’s gymnast Kerri Strug. For those who may have forgotten, Strug broke an ankle on a vault, but performed a second vault with the injury to enable to the U.S. team to win gold in 1996. This year’s U.S. women, competing at the end without Biles, took silver
4. Another touching tale from the Olympics is the quick demise of “Japanese” tennis player Naomi Osaka. She was the face of these Olympics in Japan, even being chosen to light the ceremonial flaming cauldron. Not bad for a kid who grew up in Long Island, NY, and Florida. While born in Japan, Osaka has been in the United States since age 3. The daughter of a Japanese mother and Haitian father, Osaka once had dual citizenship with Japan and the U.S, but renounced the latter in recent years. She opted to retain Japanese citizenship and compete for Japan. I wonder if she was yet another non-citizen who voted for Biden? Cynics suggested lucrative marketing opportunities in Japan weighed in the decision to represent that country. And we wonder if representing Haiti was ever considered?

The exposure of these Olympic Games for what they truly are, that being an exercise in propaganda, exploitation and telling of tall tales, likely will continue until the closing ceremonies. Expect said ceremonies fittingly to be conducted before a virtually empty stadium and to be viewed by a similarly sparse TV audience.

File this under the category of hometown pride. I am here to proclaim our drivers in the Greater Johnstown, Pennsylvania, area as the worst I’ve ever seen.

Take it from a guy who has driven in Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Miami and ridden in vehicles in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, among others.

I also have driving experience in some places you would not expect to make anyone’s list for horrible drivers, such as Bradenton, Fla. I was warned before going to Bradenton for my first coverage of Pirates spring training that drivers there were a horror show.

And they were; probably still are. Bradenton motorists mostly fall into one category for pathetic driving, that having to do with the elderly population and an apparent inability to read and comprehend road signage, not to mention being unable to grasp how to operate anything more complex and speedy than a golf cart.

Drivers in other venues are horrendous for differing reasons.

Drivers in Boston, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia operate on the ragged edge, driving under the motto as relayed by one comic that the intent is to make you brake first. They will cut lanes, stop dead, pull out in front of rapidly moving traffic and generally act like people with a strong death wish.

You combat that by driving wildly enough to make them think you are crazy, too. They respect that.

Other cities have drivers operating in rash, unsafe manners of varied description, but they tend to be a homogeneous group, either driving with frenzy or with some sort of lethargic detachment from the situation.

And then there are the Johnstown drivers, who touch both ends of the spectrum, either being stupidly aggressive or foolishly cautious. It is the uncertainty of that, never knowing what type you might be up against, that makes this group the worst.

During the course of one brief drive today I had one elderly brain donor pull from a parking space, weave over the line that divides lanes on a one-way street several times in 100 feet or so, and then timidly proceed through the green light after somehow winding up in the proper lane.

I, meanwhile, had slowed appreciably behind him, all the better to preserve my vehicle.

Before I was able to reach my destination on that very same drive, I’d seen people hammer their brakes and stop nearly dead just because a few orange cones had been set up to define lanes of travel in an area in which people were working – really just milling around – along the side of the road.

It occurred to me that if the mere sight of an orange traffic cone acts as such a speed suppressor, the powers-that-be might want to start bolting them to stop signs to encourage proper response from people like my elderly woman neighbor who thinks stop really means yield.

She is not alone. Johnstown drivers treat stop signs as a suggestion, not a command. Most, having cruised right through the sign and saved that precious second or so they would have lost by stopping fully, then give it back in multiples by crawling well below the speed limit.

This also applies to the people who inexplicably pull out in front of you from a side street, then tool along 15 miles-an-hour below the speed limit, usually looking to hang a left turn against traffic within a half-mile of travel.

These members of the Anti-Destination League are constant irritants to the crazed crowd who, in a statement of sexual equality, seem to be split about 50-50 between men and women.

Just two days ago some sweet young thing, eager to exit a shopping area and disdainful that drivers in both lanes ahead of her were observing the speed limit on a road as rough as the Ho Chi Minh trail (after the B-52 bombers made a few passes) sped up and swapped lanes behind me with abandon.

I had a panoramic view from the drivers seat seat in my Mustang convertible, which had its top down. Unable to make desired progress, and never mind that the light at the intersection was red, she veered wildly to the right, through the parking lot of a closed convenience store, with the goal of exiting that, turning left across two lanes of traffic and getting ahead of us slowpokes.

Unfortunately for her, I saw what she was attempting, our light turned green, and I hurried to make my right turn, cutting her off. I’d like to say I let it go at that. But anyone who knows me understands it didn’t end there.

Having interrupted her end run, I asked her and her male companion exactly what the X#$% they thought they were doing? Getting no response I drove on and, after what seemed like a moment of deliberation on their part, they decided not to follow me.

Too bad. I’d have loved to have discussed their idiocy further.

My brother, a former wheel man who was the epitome of the drive-it-like-you-stole-it method, his list of crashed/thrashed vehicles providing testimony to that creed, finds himself amazed at what we see on short drives together to visit our mother in a long-term care facility.

Even the parking lot of that facility is no safe haven from the Johnstown extremes – the fast and the oblivious.

We in Johnstown don’t have a lot going for us economically or politically. We’re famous mostly for having suffered repeated natural disasters in the form of floods, or for our once-great steel-making and mining industries that have all but dried up.

But give us our due. Our drivers in general are absolute jokes. The worst. We’re number one!

The continuing onslaught of COVID-19 hype, contradictions and general fear mongering, brings to mind the classic idiom “It’s all Greek to me.”

Some of the latest hysteria is, literally, Greek, as in letters of the Greek alphabet. We’ve been warned about the Delta strain of COVID-19, which on one day is much more infectious and deadly, while on other days it is merely more infectious but less deadly. I’m thinking less infectious and less deadly is an option we never will hear mentioned.

The news of this Delta COVID strain didn’t seem to produce the desired result of terror and blind obedience to vaccine demands, so we were introduced to the Lambda variant of COVID. I’m no expert on the Greek alphabet, but I think they’ve skipped a few letters.

A quick check confirms that. Delta is the fourth letter in the Greek alphabet. Lambda is the 11^th (chosen perhaps for the LAMB component of the name hoping to guide the sheep subconsciously into submission?)

What happened to Epsilon. Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota and Kappa, letters 5 through 10?

Jabbering Joe Biden checks in periodically with more nonsensical utterances that fall under the category of Greek to me, and possibly to you.

Last week he stated flatly that anyone getting a vaccine would not get COVID-19 – any variation. This must come as quite the shock to the growing number of vaccinated who are becoming infected.

Joe’s handlers have walked that back to you can be infected even after having been jabbed, but the symptoms won’t be as severe.

Meanwhile, reports continue to be made on sources outside the Lamestream media of people who have died as the result of adverse reactions to the vaccines.

Protests are breaking out around the world – Australia, various European countries, even in our good, old U.S.A – against lockdowns, masks and mandatory vaccine submission.

As vaccine resistance grows, the threats from the jabbers increase. The unvaccinated will be segregated like lepers into colonies, unable to mix with the vaccinated crowd.

Vaccine passports/certificates will be necessary to allow the freedom of movement and access we used to take for granted in this country.

Even amidst that Nazi-like plan for “papers” we read that in England all who participated in vaccine studies, whether they actually got the vaccine or were injected with a fake to study the placebo effect, still will receive their papers.

To reiterate, merely showing willingness to be subservient to the decrees made by the burgeoning mass of tin-pot dictators will grant the individual favored vaccine status, even though they are not vaccinated.

Against this mounting backdrop of contradiction and outright chicanery, if you’re still buying the fear these people are selling, you need to take a few moments alone in quiet room for some serious soul-searching.

The Olympic Games have barely begun and already there is cause for celebration.

The U.S. women’s soccer team has managed to come out of the gate with a lopsided loss to Sweden, which will prevent at least temporarily certain flamboyant team members from making more political statements and cashing in on additional ad endorsements as the flavor of the year.

My Olympics gameplan is to attempt to make it through the entire deluge of broadcasts without watching a single second. I will keep tabs on the progress via the internet, if only to recognize and celebrate such butt-kickings as our soccer women suffered and any similar setbacks to our social justice warriors cum athletes. (Please note, cum is Latin usage, not sexual slang).

The Games have begun amidst general controversy over whether they even should be staged considering the COVID Delta variation hysteria.

Polls have shown a large percentage of residents in host Japan, and beyond question the wisdom of initiating this burst of worldwide travel in the interest of athletic competition.

On a side note, gripes have been heard from athletes about the cardboard beds in their sleeping quarters, which some have suggested are there in order to cut down on their notoriously randy behavior. But one Olympian put to rest such speculation that the beds could not hold up to pairs horizontal exercise by jumping up and down (alone) on his bed and posting the video on social media for our consumption.

The U.S. Women’s soccer team still could rally to win this affair, and provide its opportunist members a chance once again to mount the metaphorical soapbox to lament the nation’s and world’s ills as viewed through their biased and parochial prism.

Oh, for the days when the Olympics were athletic competition first and last.

While attending a car cruise the past Sunday, one of the vehicles had a decal that read “I miss the America I grew up in.”

Along that line, I miss the Olympics that I remember from my youth, when individual politics were to be checked at the door and we were able to celebrate without reservation the successes of the athletes. We enjoyed the high-level competition and felt good when one of ours brought home the gold, silver or bronze medals.

Many Olympic athletes remain true to that non-political ideal. Too many do not. And, due to the leftist leanings of lamestream media, the malcontents will get wide play, while the athletes concentrating on the competition and keeping their political and social opinions to themselves, will get short shrift.

Even before the Games began, many athletes came out — excuse the expression — to note that should they win (or in some cases, even make the U.S. team) they would seize quickly the chance to state their personal political and social views.

To all these, I offer the inverse of the mantra of the late owner of the Oakland/Los Angeles/Oakland/Las Vegas Raiders, Al Davis: Just lose, baby!