Red Face-off and White Washing

American men are behaving badly at the Winter Olympics again.  Including Shaun White.

First, to get it out of the way, the U.S. men's ice hockey team.  Ahead 2-0 over Slovenia, the Americans suddenly collapsed and lost 3-2.  After the American women beat out the Olympic Athletes from Russia team in a shutout (5-0), the men shut down. Which prompted all of those silly Americans chanting "We're number one!" to shut up.  (At least one of the current White House residents, I'm sure, was secretly pleased.)  

As if seeing our guys live up to the tradition of American national men's teams choking weren't bad enough, we now learn that Shaun White is yet another celebrity involved in a sexual harassment case.  White has his own rock band, appropriately titled Bad Things, with a female drummer that has since left the band after White did . . . bad things.  To her.  It was since been reported that he texted her pictures of  private parts, and he has also been accused of having shown her hardcore porn, forcing her to drink vodka, trying to make her change her look to appear sexier, and making her smell something, uh, personal.  After his gold-medal victory in these PyeongChang Winter Games (the one hundredth gold-medal victory for the U.S. in the Winter Games' 94-year history), White, who settled with the woman out of court, admitted to the first charge but not the others, dismissing the rest as "gossip."  White sounds like a guy who's addicted to cocaine, crystal meth, and tobacco and only admits to smoking.

White has since apologized for his poor choice of words ("gossip?") and how he handled the story when it came to the fore; the case, for the record, was settled out of court.  He admits to being in a dark place at the time of his fourth-place halfpipe showing at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, leading to his bad behavior.  But the truth is that White has always been in a dark place of sorts.  No one in snowboarding likes him because of his swagger and self-importance. "To so many who saw the text messages, read the allegations," Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports wrote about White's magnificent comeback on the halfpipe course this week after his Sochi disappointment, "the notion of redemption was nothing more than a canard to distract from a far uglier story."

I'm not going to equate the U.S. men's ice hockey team's misdemeanor of sucking to White's high crimes.  But to see both stories at the same time has certainly caused a pang of rue for anyone who expected our guys at the Winter Olympics to be shining examples of American manhood in the Age of Trump.  Uh, fellas, could I see you in my office?     

No Justice

I live in West Caldwell, New Jersey, and I usually make a concerted effort to downplay that fact and hide it altogether, as its most famous former resident, Justice Samuel Alito, keeps giving me reasons to do so. Alito - whom many of my neighbors take great pride in - was present at a fundraising dinner for The American Spectator, a right-wing magazine famous for devoting resources to bring down President Bill Clinton on trumped-up charges going back to his days as governor of Arkansas - and championing his impeachment.

Alito has involved himself in political fundraising despite his role as a Supreme Court justice, and of course he was the key fifth vote in handing down the Citizens United decision which let money flow freely and heavily from major corporations. This is despite his supposed disdain for appearing at presidential State of the Union addresses because of the "partisanship" of such affairs - and at the last such event, of course, he famously insisted that the Citizens United decision would not affect the balance of corporate campaign funding or encourage foreign donations. He was wrong on both counts, but not as wrong as we will be if we imagine that the idea of Alito going to political fundraisers and palling around with domestic terrorists like Michele Bachmann is an impeachable offense. The code of conduct for the American judiciary clearly prohibits such activity. Alito dismissed the American Spectator dinner appearance as "not important." Of course, he's wrong again.

Oh yeah, this isn't Alito's first appearance at a fundraiser sponsored by the American Spectator. At the 2008 dinner, he made a speech calling Joe Biden a serial plagiarizer.

Alito is not just an embarrassment to my hometown or state. He's an embarrassment to this country.

Read about this year's American Spectator shindig here.