Yesterday, in his infinite nice guy-ness, Scott Van Pelt hosted Chris on his ESPN radio program. You can listen to that audio here:

Yes, unfortunately, Mitch Albom was on Van Pelt’s show before Chris, which left Moat-ram in the unenviable position of responding to Albom’s weird thoughts on bloggers, which, if you listened to that audio above, you heard. If you’d rather just read it, first of all, your mother would be proud of you, and second, here it is:

“Bloggers can essentially basically be anyone with a computer. And anyone with a computer does not belong on the level any more than I should just be able to to arrest somebody you know because I decided to, versus being a police officer. Or do somebody’s taxes because I decided to, versus going to accounting school. [...] At least in my case and a lot of the people that are from my era and I’ve been in this close to three decades now, we went to school for this. We trained for this. I have a Master’s degree from Columbia. I learned certain rules about what is journalism and what isn’t”

(You know how, sometimes, we bloggers get a little too angry? In the heat of the computer laptop, we don’t temper our thoughts the way we would in normal conversation? You know how Van Pelt wants to have reasonable dialogue on this matter? I’m warning you right now: That’s not going to happen here. Ready? Proceed.)

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It’s been two days since the Olympics had their final impressive flourish, a closing ceremonies that somehow incorporated both an aging (and suddenly censored) Jimmy Page, a mind-blowing Memory Tower covered in Chinese gymnasts, and a suddenly depressed Yao Ming. (Poor Yao. Cheer up, big fella.) It was a fitting end to the spectacle of the Olympic Games — simultaneously flashy and substantive, but ultimately meaningless.

If there is one enduring lesson from the 2008 Olympics, it’s that countries are allowed to break their promises, so long as other countries have enough cash invested in no one asking about those broken promises. It’s how, despite commitments to the contrary, China was able to restrict press access to the Internet and restrain its citizens from protesting in designated zones. In an Olympics that was supposed to celebrate a new, open China, the country revealed its older, nastier traits: mysterious, restrictive, monolithic.

But what China will we remember? The China that wowed us with beautiful new buildings? Or the one that sent two 70-year-old women to “re-education” for daring to ask why their houses were bulldozed? The China that wowed us with its fireworks? Or the one that faked those fireworks? The China that built the Great Wall to repel invaders? Or the one that built the Great Firewall and turned it inward on its visitors?

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