Glen Beck, the latest angry US pundit, spoke out a couple of days ago against US President Obama’s (now unsuccessful) trip to Copenhagen to lobby the Olympic Committee to hold the 2016 Olympics in Chicago. He mentioned that the Vancouver Olympics had already “lost a billion dollars”.
The White House called him out on the fact that as we all know all-too-well around here, the Olympics haven’t taken place yet:
RHETORIC: BECK SAID VANCOUVER LOST $1 BILLION WHEN IT “HAD THE OLYMPICS.” Glenn Beck said, “Vancouver lost, how much was it? they lost a billion dollars when they had the Olympics.” [Transcript, Glenn Beck Show, 9/29/09]
REALITY: VANCOUVER’S OLYMPICS WILL NOT TAKE PLACE UNTIL 2010. Vancouver will host the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games from February 12 – 28, 2010 and March 12–21, 2010, respectively. [Vancouver2010.com, accessed 9/29/09]
In response, Beck explained that he meant Calgary, and then began an accounting of how much he thinks Vancouver is going to lose, with the final tab coming to somewhere around a 4.5 billion-dollar shortfall. I’m speechless. The audio, via YouTube, is below:
Well my quick check of Wikipedia says that Calgary made a profit of between $90–150 million. I’ll be kind and assume that Mr Beck is referring to Montreal going into the hole when it hosted the 1976 summer games. But then again, given the general quality of arguments, it wouldn’t surprise me if he wouldn’t recognize a ‘fact’ if he found it in his bowl of soup.