Keller @ Large: Globe Columnist Wrong On Boston 2024 Olympics Fight

BOSTON (CBS) - Shirley Leung of the Globe has written a column about our qualms over hosting the Summer Olympics that is so wrong on so many levels, it demands a detailed response.

"We are difficult people," she writes. "Just ask the British." I presume this is a reference to the Boston Tea Party and the ensuing American Revolution, and if so it is woefully ignorant.

Those events were a populist uprising led by the merchant class and others who objected to being taxed without representation, a principled, reasonable position.

"We get a kick out of knocking people down, putting everyone in their place when they get too big, too successful, too soon," she says, which I guess to be a suggestion that we have mistreated the local millionaires pushing the Games. No specific examples are given, and if the perfectly valid criticisms of the vague, presumptuous Olympic rollout so far amount to "knocking people down" then I'd say we need more of that, not less.

Ms. Leung sneers at us for how we "moaned and groaned" about the Big Dig. Perhaps she was living out of town when the costs of that poorly-managed boondoggle ballooned out of control, crippling the rest of our transportation infrastructure and sticking us with crushing debt. The problem was we didn't moan and groan enough when the same breed of downtown titans who are behind the Olympics now were foisting the Big Dig on us.

Leung calls us "stingy."

Yes, we're stingy about risking billions of precious public dollars on a risky scheme of dubious public benefit.

But when she accuses us of juvenile "tantrums," that is the exact opposite of the truth. This is how adults act when we're fed spin and nonsense.

But Leung's column does serve a purpose.

We will be needing something to get the coals lit at our cookouts this weekend.

Listen to Jon's commentary:

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