Leadership Quote by George Nethercutt

It lands like a blunt instrument because it’s meant to. George Nethercutt’s line isn’t trying to persuade with a policy case; it’s trying to draw a bright moral boundary and recruit the listener into enforcing it. The first sentence, “They want the Olympics,” is deliberately flat and depersonalized: “they” are reduced to a single desire, a shorthand for a foreign government, an adversary, or a disliked constituency. The second sentence turns that desire into leverage. “We ought to make sure” frames obstruction as civic responsibility, not spite, and “don’t get” is the language of withholding a reward. The Olympics become less a sporting event than a prize you deny to keep someone in line.

The subtext is punishment without saying the word. It borrows the emotional clarity of sports - winners and losers, earned and unearned - to justify a geopolitical or cultural veto. That’s why it works rhetorically: it converts a complicated question (human rights, security, legitimacy, global prestige, domestic politics) into a simple act of gatekeeping. You can be for “we” without having to master the details of “they.”

Contextually, this kind of phrasing tends to surface when hosting rights are tied to broader anxieties: rising rivals, authoritarian optics, or fears that a mega-event will launder a country’s reputation. Nethercutt’s sentence is a small specimen of a larger American political instinct: treat international prestige as a tool of discipline, and treat denial as virtue. It’s not an argument about the Olympics; it’s an argument about who gets to confer legitimacy.