Drowning in Olympics coverage

and choking on US medal count, pt-uck, but check this out. Fareed's not catching up with Jon S., but this is good stuff:

The more intelligent question is, given what we knew at the time, was toppling Saddam's regime a worthwhile objective? Bush's answer is yes, Howard Dean's is no. Kerry's answer is that it was a worthwhile objective but was disastrously executed. For this "nuance" Kerry has been attacked from both the right and the left. But it happens to be the most defensible position on the subject. {...} Perhaps Iraq would have been a disaster no matter what. But there's a thinly veiled racism behind such views, implying that Iraqis are savages genetically disposed to produce chaos and anarchy. In fact, other nation-building efforts over the past decade have gone reasonably well, when well planned and executed.

But while we're on the topic of the Olympics, random notes from Kelli Anderson at SI:

Bonus content for the trivia-inclined: Because I know you're wondering and because I bothered to look all this stuff up while stuck on a media bus for an hour and a half this morning after my small vat of coffee from Starbuckopolis had run dry: Pieter van den Hoogenband does not actually have the longest collection of letters in the roll call of Olympic swim champions. That distinction belongs to Halyna Prozumenshchykova, a Soviet who won the women's 200 breaststroke in '64 in Tokyo -- unless you include spaces, in which case Hoogie wins by a fingernail.

And I thought it was about the size of your feet ...