Phelps Fallout
February 10, 2009It has been quite a while since my last toke of the weed (a couple years, actually), so my interest in this might not be what it once was, but I can’t help but scratch my head and wonder why the heck I just saw this headline: Eight arrested in Michael Phelps case
COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) – New details have emerged about a party where Olympic champion Michael Phelps was spotted.
On Feb. 2, a British tabloid published a picture of the 14-time Olympic gold medalist using a water pipe to smoke marijuana. The picture was taken at a party in Columbia back in November when Phelps was here for a visit.
The Richland County Sheriff’s Department has been taking a lot of heat from people in this country and all over the world.
They want to know why Sheriff Leon Lott is going after Michael Phelps.
Many are saying the sheriff should concentrate on more serious crimes, or at the very least, not focus solely on the Olympic champion when there were others at the party who were also breaking the law.
Now it appears the case has expanded beyond Phelps’ activities.
I swear, someone could break into my house tomorrow, steal all my stuff, kill my dog, and piss on the floor, and all I’d be able to do is file a report that would get placed on a shelf somewhere and eventually get ignored. But someone takes a pic of Michael Phelps taking a hit of pot, and suddenly there’s some sheriff who thinks he’s Horatio Caine and the CSI team performs 128-bit analysis of the photo, dusts for prints, checks shoe sizes and tread on the carpet, samples the wallpaper for residue, and pulls hair out of the bathtub in search of the perps responsible for this heinous crime.
I’m sure that I’m not the only one out there wondering why this is even a big deal to begin with. Heck, I wonder why people swoon over Michael Phelps at all. Sure, the guy won a ton of gold medals, but he’s a swimmer. Just think about it, no one gives two turds about swimmers otherwise. It’s not like people are going to the sports bar on Mondays to watch Monday Night Swimming, after all.
Anyway, since the guy is freakishly good at swimming, he’s apparently perceived as some role model (for reasons that are obviously beyond me, he’s near the top with almost 2 million fans on facebook), and the fact that he has had his picture taken with a bong to his lips represents some sort of scandal. I suppose that may mean something in the realm of endorsements and the sales of his Officially Licensed Merchandise, but for God’s sake, leave the other poor saps at the party out of the blast radius.
ChenZhen's Chamber 
I actually had my apartment busted into recently, a few grand in stuff stolen, my cat apparently kicked (few broken ribs) and precisely what you described happened.
Unfortunately much like the rest of society municipal services need the headlines sometimes. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong just letting my fellow peons know the deal.
Marc-
the report on the shelf, or the CSI expo?
the shelving.
These arrests stem from a sheriff wanting his 15 minutes. I don’t really know how a picture of someone smoking a bong is even grounds for the search warrant. How do we know what the hell he’s even really smoking? That question sounds silly, but there is a pic of dead rabbit smoking from a hookah. And although Dead Rabbit seems to toke about once a year to remind himself that he hates the feeling of being paranoid, in this case the hookah was full of Arab tobacco.
Maybe the upshot to this is kids will get a reminder that smoking weed can get you into trouble. However, it blows yet another confusing cloud of smoke over the question why you should get in such trouble for it.
Good to see you back Chen…I was about to take you in my death pool. Looks like I’ll have to go with John Madden.
….although, your still suspiciously and dare i say maybe even cowardly apolitical since the botched up oath taken by you know who…
playing d always takes more hustle, chen. man up.
CZ, I think that the Michael Phelps thing is unbelievable! Where will it end? I guess we should bust writers, authors, songwriters for ever writing about drugs, doing drugs, thinking about doing drugs, or whatever! I agree with dead rabbit, it’s all about the sheriff wanting his 15 minutes of fame! Or looking to do a show with A&E!!
Just my thoughts, just my opinions, and always in a conversationalTone.
Mary Caliendo
rabbit-
umm…that was Roberts who botched the oath. Obama was really just being polite in not correcting him with the whole world watching.
So Michael Phelps is a guy who drinks at parties smokes a little gambles on high stakes games of beer pong and is the all time greatest Olympic medal winner he sounds like a pretty cool guy to me. Michael Phelps is an American Hero. He stood tall and made America proud at the Beijing Olympics. This is how he is treated. Michael Phelps did a tremendous amount of work to achive what he did. Who can forget the pride we felt with the each gold medal Phelps won in China, how can we as Americans forget all of those things and hang a man for smoking a glass water pipe at a college party. It is time that we as a country stand up for the rights of the individual, it’s time we stand together with our neighbors and take collective control of our destinies. Write any congressman or a senator; imagine the weight of millions of emails calling for a change in policy. Lets stop them from arresting college kids at parties in America.
SunflowerPipes.com
How are the talking points hannity and limbaugh playing out for you rabid? Havent you noticed how they went from spewing floppy crap right to diarrea?
First if you think there is any substance in “is he “REALLY” our president” i think you can imagine what i think of you.
Second do you really believe appealing to the division between left and right in your country is in the interest of the right side of the spectrum?
Didnt your fellow countrymen rejected that in the last election? If they want it more divided than it is its probably more likely to go left than right.
What the right need to do is to shed their extremist side and concentrate on substance in their crap, the left has the more solid poop right now.
You know that you cant aim diarrea ,it splatters all over yourself when you try to throw it.
Good luck with solidifying.
I have to point out that every time a sports figure gets himself into trouble, he says that he shouldn’t be a role model.
Did these people not grow up in the US? Did they not notice that, whether they like it or not, kids put posters of sports stars on their wall?
He signed up for the sports-hero gig. He gets all that comes with it — being a role model, hsi face on the Wheaties box, news stories talking about how great he is, and the fact that the paparazzi want to ruin his life.
How big a deal is it? That depends on how serious you take marijuana use.
But let’s not pretend that these guys are unfairly burdened with attention that they never wanted.
Thats why its probably best to pretend to be bad- say tou use drugs when you dont ,it saves you the whining of people when they get their unrealistic expectations of you shattered.
Just make sure youre not really bad, the smart people will see trough you and you end up with only the idiots.
baaz, you seem to have typed out a cryptic, undecipherable message directed at me. The problem is, I don’t know what the hell you are talking about and defy anyone to make sense of what the hell you are saying and why it’s directed at me.
Chen, I didn’t mean that Obama goofed it up and wouldn’t even hold it against him in any way if he did.
I still think you’re too lazy and cowardly to tackle that crazy shit going down as of late.
as for phelps, don’t get me wrong, he deserves to lose his cash cows over this…just not sure he should be the target of an investigation costing tax payers thousands of dollars.
It was a metaphore about poop ,no problem if you dont understand it, its nothing to worry about.
Personally, I think 90% of drugs should be decriminalized. I don’t do drugs but that’s beside the point. The war on drugs will never be won. It’ll just keep filling up our prisons.
As for Phelps, something tells me that in certain circles he’s not as popular as we might think. There’s something about the sudden endorsement pullout that makes me think there is some bad blood there somewhere.
Besides, this marijuana thing could be a bad harbinger. I can see the future headlines now:
“Washed up swimmer Michael Phelps denies that he killed his wife and the waiter who may or may not have been having an affair with her. NBC preempts programming to cover police pursuit of Phelps in his white bronco.”
Rutherford–I’m inclined to agree with you on that. Every time some kid is abducted by a released sex offender I wonder which poor stoner got his cell.
Sunflower,
I think you care a little too much about the Olympics. While I enjoy seeing the U.S. win awards (and am ticked off at China for cheating), I won’t be moving to China anytime soon because they won more medals. That isn’t how I decide the greatness of a nation.
rabbit-
I’m sure you have something specific in mind.
General Chenzhen,
My old friend. How you been doing? In reading thru the comments, I assume everything is okay?
Don’t be ducking out on us now. Your man is center stage and nobody defends the indefensible better than you.
Hope all is well!
Welcome back Tex, I thought it’d be a while before seeing you again 🙂
Then again, time flies like a diving swallow..
Unless chen is dealing with some personal stuff, which I hope he is not, he has proved to be a total fraud, just like many of us suspected. This first month had so much he could should have been offering his analysis on. Fly by night fraud. Actually, he literally may not have the intellectual weight to hang.
Just look at his last 3 posts. Unbelievable. Some nonsense on the Bush “meme”, Jack Daniels and Phelps smoking weed.
Chen feels the only thing out there to discuss is….well Bush…and pop culture. LOL
Now rabbit, I’m guessing that using incendiary words like “fraud” are more of an attempt to poke and prod me into making threads about whatever it is that you want to debate. You want to talk about the stimulus bill, or what? What is it that is bothering you?
I created a whole network of other bloggers that talk politics, mainly because I knew that I couldn’t possibly touch every current event and political fiasco that sprang up out there. (Some of us have real full-time jobs and actual lives, after all.) Go ahead, check it out.
I really don’t know what direction the Chamber will take at this point. Will I go on with pro-Obama posts? Will I just offer my take of the day’s news? Will I go back to making fun of other bloggers? I don’t know. but the Chamber is what it is, and I don’t recall representing it any differently. Its organic. “Fraud”? From where I’m sitting, that’s an attempt to goad me. So, what the heck, I guess I’ll bite. Pick a topic and I’ll make it a thread.
“Will I go on with pro-Obama posts?”
What kind of question is that? Jesus. You have no soul.
I always knew it was all a game to you. It was never Chen’s take on what direction our nation should go in. It was like you joined a fantasy politics league or something.
🙄
Not to pile on Chen or anything but this is a fascinating comment. Just the other night I was saying to my wife that blogging the presidential election was fairly easy because it wasn’t much different from taking sides in a sporting event. Your team rocks and the other guys team sucks. Every time you post, you slam the opposing team or discuss another reason why your team ought to win.
Once the game is won (or lost) where do you go from there? I confess that on November 5 I went into a slight panic because I would now have to write about issues and not as much on personalities. It’s damn hard. I don’t claim to be all that great at it but I’m forcing myself. One thing that helps is that compared to McCain, Obama was the Messiah. Now that he is President, I can take him off the pedestal a wee bit and look at him more critically.
Chen, here is the rub the way I see it. You started a great concept by coordinating a bunch of politically minded bloggers into an alliance where we get to debate each other and hopefully make each other’s blogs better through intellectual challenge. You, whether you like it or not, are the leader of this alliance. You, whether you like it or not, are kinda expected to blog (at least 60 – 75%) about politics. And I have to hand it to Dead Rabbit, there is more than enough stuff going on right now that could be fodder for you. Heaven knows the future of our economy is damn more important to address than the merits of an Olympian swimmer smoking weed.
The occasional “puff piece” is to be expected but the trend here is a bit alarming:
LGF Being Punked
Blago’s Hair (vs Blago’s politics)
A Kung Fu video
An automobile challenge
Christian music critique
Blog stats
Ten High Kentucky whiskey
Phelps with weed
Scattered among these was some Al Franken and Bush stuff. That’s not meeting the 60% to 75% political content standard that I think folks have come to expect from you.
This blog is fun. Your writing is fun to read. If you don’t want the blog to mainly be about politics, just say so and everybody’s expectations can be reset. If that is the case, I’ll still keep coming because, as I said, you’re a good writer and even puff pieces are a fun diversion. Just let us know what to expect, that’s all.
Hey now, Blago’s hair, that was big news, dammit.
I thought this was funny and spot on:
What Micheal Phelps Should Have Said
Lottie,
LOL …. talk about the fast track to losing even more endorsements! 🙂
rutherford-
I appreciate the compliment. You’ve got a point, too, ’cause everything in my sidebar would lead visitors to believe that the site is politically-themed, so I can understand that it looks like I’ve been off my game lately. I’ve been on a bit of a political hiatus, I’ll admit.
You guys are too bloody cheerful, you know that right? LOL
Eh Chen, we’re “friends” at Digg! I’d forgotten about that till I went there and saw you listed….LOL. Now you have to “digg” me, baby.
No kidding! But so much of it was oh so true. LOL
Does anyone have any cheesy poofs? 🙂
Still with the Cheesy Poofs, Sage?
Chen’s hoping we think his lack of posting and the subject matter of his few blogs since Obama’s victory are of themselves a sort of commentary.
I guarantee Chen is too ignorant to delve into the real world. Everyone knows its easier to be on the attack, in his case, the Bush Administration. It’s typical college boy faux-intellectualism.
Chen is a simple ass jester. Nothing more. Playing coy with us all, liberal and conservative, by trying to humor the Rabbit with a (read in an effeminate voice)”Fine Rabbit, whaaaaat do yoooou want me to write about.”
Mean while, the biggest government spending program has been unleashed by a democracy in the history of man kind. This package compares to the government spending of the Pharaohs’ pyramids.
Chen wants to duck out from the pathetic Obama vetting process? Fine, no biggy. No news is good news, uh Chen?
But to pretend your some kind of engineer of a political blogging network and then sarcastically reply to me when called on your lack of opinion about a historic moment in our nation’s history?
So, I refuse to pretend Chen is just trying to ruffle feathers. I also refuse to believe he is taking a break. go ahead chen, build a wall around your half concealed ignorance, chump.
Let the record show: Chen was no more then a 20 something dim wit who does not have the balls, the wit, or the courage to voice his opinion during a time when sound opinions were needed and sound opinions took true reflection and investigation.
I am calling for a 6 month boycott of Chen’s Chamber until he hands it over to the Rabbit or writes a letter of apology to us all.
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