Can you imagine if Richard Nixon tearfully plead his case on Oprah’s couch, answering the hard questions from a “soft” voice, and asking for the country’s forgiveness before resigning from office? That’s about where we are these days: Screw up, and there are a few options to rehabilitate your reputation: Go to rehab. Make fun of yourself on Saturday Night Live, or you can bawl your eyes out on Oprah and allow her to make your case for you. It works more often than it should.
Lance Armstrong is taking the Oprah route. After years and years and YEARS of denying doping allegations, an overwhelming irrefutable evidence was mounted against Lance Armstrong. He was stripped of his titles. He was banned from cycling for life. And yet: He still continued to deny. But in a 90-minute episode of Oprah set to air on Thursday, Lance Armstrong will come clean and ask for absolution. There’s no way he should be given it, not after he insisted his denials LONG after everyone else gave up believing him.
Among the casualties in his wake of denial was the London Times, the newspaper that Lance Armstrong sued and extracted $1.5 million out of nearly 15 years ago, using England’s harsh libel laws against the newspaper. David Walsh, the sports journalist largely responsible for the Times initial accusations, has now offered up 10 questions he’d like Oprah to ask Lance Armstrong. He’s clearly very pissed off at Lance Armstrong, and who can blame him? He wasn’t just lying to the bicycling community and it’s fans: He was lying to the cancer community, and that is unacceptable. His lies also made him a very wealthy man.
Here are the 10 questions that the Times would like Oprah to ask.
Hopefully, instead of forgiving Armstrong, the American public will give him what he deserves: A one-way trip to VH1 celebreality programming and eventual obscurity. Remember when he tweeted this image, after he’d has his titles stripped away, as if to say: “I don’t care what anyone says. I won them. You can see them on my wall.”
That’s the opposite of class, jackass.
