With the McCain campaign trying to restart the Cold War at the urging of a paid lobbyist for Georgia and those same geniuses who got us in this whole Iraq mess in the first place, and my Olympics addiction ratcheting into 4th gear (5th gear starts Friday with Track & Field), I thought I'd quickly point out how ridiculous the medal count is. This uber-patriotic counting of medals was a great way of asserting the superiority of democracy over communism during the Cold War. And now...

I guess size does matter.

The medal count now seems to simply be a measure of the size of country and it's level of development. The bigger the country the larger field of athletes The more athletes the wider range of events they can medal in. Sure, one dominating athlete can artificially increase a countries medal count (if Michael Phelps was Canadian then the Canadians would be jumping from last to nearly first) as can one country's expertise in one certain event (Australia and swimming for example), however in the long run after 320 events, the biggest, most developed will rise to the top.