I let loose yesterday with a little of my disgust with the International Olympic Committee. Sure, some of this has to do with the removal of baseball from the program for the 2012 London Games, but a lot of it has to do with the Olympics having become fairly lame and over-commercialized in general over the years.

The rest has to do with the fact that  I think the IOC are one of the more ridiculous organizations on the planet. At the end of the day it’s still sports and  nothing to get all that worked up about. But reading this King Kaufman column in Salon today got me close.

“We are not a political body, we are not an NGO,” Rogge said, reiterating a long-held position, “but it is our responsibility to make sure the athletes get the best possible games which they deserve.”

What a jerk.  Don’t try to use the term NGO to over-exaggerate what people expect of you and the IOC, and  then double back on that with some open ended statement about the essence of the Olympics.

I don’t want to drag baseball into this,  but clearly the removal of the game was a blatant political move.

But I digress. King Kaufman is calling Rogge out, which I’m happy to see. Unfortunately, not enough other people do.

The International Olympic Committee might not see itself as a political body, but it can’t avoid political decisions. It made one in 2001 when it awarded the 2008 Games to Beijing. Rogge has talked ever since about how the Olympics would shine a spotlight on China and force it to improve its human-rights record.

I’ve read these kinds of quotes by Rogge over the past year or so and it always bugs me. I’m glad this Tibet thing is happening now so that these sorts of questions are pelting him in the face.

More than anything, that was a justification for what was essentially an economic decision, opening up the massive, emerging China market for Olympics Inc. But how was it not political to say that granting the Games to China would improve human rights there? It’s political to say that China must improve on human rights, and it’s political to argue that certain actions, such as granting the Games, will foster that improvement.

Yeah. Lest we forget the Olympics are 100% a commercial entity. A commercial entity that happen to be large enough to get ensnared by politics. Ironically, the decision to have the Olympics in Beijing wasn’t any different than the decision to have the recent MLB exhibitions in China. Everyone wants a piece of the pie. At least MLB is straightforward about that fact. The IOC is  anything but straightforward its intentions.