Vice President tells CNN that Olympians should not 'pop off about politics.'

The remark came in transit. The Vice President of the United States, leaving Azerbaijan and on his way home from a state visit, sat for a CNN interview and was asked about American athletes who, in the course of being interviewed at the Winter Olympics, had expressed views about the political moment in their country. His answer:

“The way to bring the country together is not to show up in a foreign country and attack the president of the United States, but it’s to play your sport and represent the country well.”

He went on to suggest that athletes should “expect some pushback” for “popping off about politics.”

The grammar of the position is unimpeachable. The biographical timing is the part to mark.

Three nights earlier, in Milan, the Vice President was booed at the opening ceremony of the same Winter Olympics. He was booed in front of sixty-five thousand people in the stadium. He was booed on the international broadcast feed. The reaction was loud enough that the U.S. broadcast feed handled the audio differently. The booing made the wires in every European capital before midnight Friday.

The athletes, in the period between the booing and the lecture, had not booed the Vice President. They had answered questions, in press settings called press conferences, from reporters whose job is to ask such questions. The answers were modest. Hunter Hess said wearing the flag did not mean he agreed with everything. He did not name anyone. The answers were also, on any defensible reading, less politically charged than booing.

The asymmetry is the part one is invited to notice.

The Vice President did not, in his interview, address his own reception. He did not say that having been booed in a foreign country oneself, three days prior, by a stadium audience that was not a press conference and was not an athlete, is a category of pop-off he might have insight into. He did not propose that the booing of an American Vice President at an international event is itself the show-up-in-a-foreign-country-and-criticize-the-leadership move he is now objecting to. The booing happened in his presence. He was the booed party.

A more disciplined administration would have noticed the symmetry and said nothing. A more disciplined administration would have understood that the exchange does not reward the higher office in this exchange. That has not been, so far, the playing posture.

Calmly documenting the decline.