Today, national teams representing 32 nations gather in South Africa, where for the next month the best soccer players on the planet will compete for the World Cup. Team USA enters the pitch tomorrow for a highly anticipated match against England. Man, isn't that just like Obama -- what with all the riots and cramming stuff down your throat? Yeah. Knock me over with a feather, but Glenn Beck sure does hate soccer. And the World Cup. And he really hates Obama, who crams stuff down our throats. Just like soccer. And the World Cup. And there are riots.
On a day when Beck returned to musing on Obama's seeming racism and renewed his attacks against Obama's family, he managed to find time to launch a yawningly uninspired attack on the World Cup. Glenn Beck's problem with soccer? Why, it's the internationalism of it all.
From the June 11 edition of The Glenn Beck Program:
BECK: I don't get the baseball thing, but the soccer thing, I hate it so much -- probably because the rest of the world likes it so much, and they riot over it, and they continually try to jam it down our throat."
Now who are “they” that are trying to “jam it down our throats” anyway? Fox?
Beck expounded upon this process of jamming soccer down our throats during his temper tantrum:
It doesn't matter how you sell it to us. It doesn't matter how many celebrities you get. It doesn't matter how many bars open early. It doesn't matter how many beer commercials they run. We don't want the World Cup. We don't like the World Cup. We don't like soccer. We want nothing to do with it. You can package it any way -- you can spend all kinds of money. You can force it on our television sets. We will not enjoy the World Cup.
Well it turns out that 120 million Americans did enjoy the World Cup that was “forced” on their television sets in 2006; 17 million Americans watched the final match alone -- and that match that didn't even include an American team. That seems like an awful lot of people not enjoying the World Cup. For sake of comparison, the NBA Finals this year are averaging 15 million viewers per night. The 2009 World Series averaged 19 million viewers.
It turns out that there is a diverse market for televised sporting events. People watch all sorts of things -- after all, an ever-decreasing number of people still watch Glenn Beck's Fox News show.