You've seen the Olympic torch being protested every hop skip and jump along it's route.  What it brings to my mind is how an outright US boycott of the Beijing Olympics would effect the career of Hawaii's world class decathlete Bryan Clay.  By all appearances, Clay seems at his prime and stands a fair chance to win the decathlon at the Beijing Olympics.  If anyone asked me, human rights guarantees should have been written into the Olympic Committee's grant for China to host the Olympics at the outset, and not limited to Tibet.  You know what would be appropriate....boycotting the opening day ceremonies in combination with boycotting live worldwide television coverage of the opening day ceremonies, as if that day in China never happened.

Well before the US owed China $500 billion, the US boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics Games in Moscow in reaction to Russia's invasion of Afghanistan.  Thereafter America rescued the mujahadeen from certain annihilation by smuggling shoulder harnessed stinger missiles to the Taliban and the Northern Alliance allowing the freedom fighters to shoot down an average of one Russian helicopter gunship per day.  The Soviet helicopter pilots were afraid to fly only to serve as a skeet shoot for the Afghani tribesmen.  Kicking things off with a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games, the incidental beneficiary in all this became Al Queda.  That's not to insinuate that monks in Tibet will evolve into a future Al Queda, but with the US's track record, the US should be the last nation in the universe to propose righting the world with another boycott.