Disclaimer: I love soccer.

Just for laffs I went over to National Review Online to see if they had written anything about the World Cup, positive or negative. After struggling with the website navigation (something is up with their Flash-based menus), I checked their blogging free-for-all, The Corner:

Google Cup John J. Miller

Google didn’t honor Memorial Day; today it has a special logo for the World Cup.

Posted at 5:37 AM

Those motherFU– Wait a minute, which is bigger, the world or the United States? Hang on, lemme go check my atlas.

…

I’ll be damned. Did you know that not only is the United States smaller than the world, it’s actually a part of the World? Who knew? But wait, there’s more!

Flying the Flag in Defiance of Oafs Iain Murray

With the World Cup currently going on (bear with me, there’s a point to this), there has been a resurgence in flag flying in England. Not just the Union Jack, but also the much-derided Flag of St. George, the national flag of England. As Andy said recently, there have been attempts to ban this inexplicable display of national pride. Thankfully politicians of most stripes have backed the people. Tony Blair has said he will fly it over 10 Downing Street and Conservative leader David Cameron has attached one to the back of his bicycle. Nevertheless, the high and mighty forces of the left-wing “commentariat” have decided this is simply too vulgar to bear. Stephen Pollard gives them both barrels.
Posted at 9:51 AM

I love that little aside– “(bear with me, there’s a point to this).” HURRRRR SOCCER IS DUMB

Anyway, so in the first example we have a little tantrum over the fact that for one day the US isn’t the biggest cock in the locker room, and in the second some kind of glurge about flag-waving patriotism. Not a peep about the fact that the US have a horse in this race, too.

Unfortunately, as a soccer fan, that’s what I’ve come to expect from this country– not only blind self-absorption when it comes to American sports, but indifference and derision for the most popular sport on the planet. Lest I be accused of being unpatriotic, or some kind of oh-God-I-wish-I-lived-in-Europeland intellectualoid who gets the vapors when someone utters the word “NASCAR,” keep in mind that my strongest footy love is for the USMNT. In fact, I’d go so far as to call myself a true patriot, and accuse soccer-hating pundits of letting their country down. Even if you think it’s the most boring sport in the world (it isn’t– that honor goes to the statisticians’ favorite masturbatory aid, baseball), why not muster a smidgen of national pride over the fact that our home-grown talent is competing with some of the finest athletes on Earth? I dunno, maybe it’s a coping mechanism on their part– if you don’t care, losing doesn’t hurt! Sometimes I wish I didn’t care, particularly in light of yesterday’s bloodbath against the Czech Republic. ;_;

Anyway, in the interest of political evenhandedness, I should mention that the World Cup coverage over at Slate is somehow just as annoying as the NRO’s cold shoulder. If reading the most ignorant American commentators is like having a warm Bud with frat boys who won’t stop using the word “faggot,” browsing the Slate dispatches is like glass after glass of an overrated California pinot noir with a guy who won’t shut up about the latest Philip Roth novel and the death of traditional American masculinity or some shit like that, hell, I don’t know, I tuned him out ten minutes ago and now I’m just nodding and smiling. …Uh, anyway, here’s an example from William Saletan’s analysis of the Serbia/Holland match:

Maybe the match says something about why so many Dutchmen protected people like me when you-know-what roamed the earth. Maybe it says something about why so many Serbs perpetrated their own ethnic cleansing in the war before the war on terror. Or maybe it’s all in my head.

I think I’d go with the latter, dude.