Bode Miller finally medalled again today, scooping a bronze in the men's downhill. Good on him, I say, even as one who's had a little fun with the sitzmark he left all over the Italian Alps four years ago. We can only hope that NBC will just let him celebrate and not construct around him one of those phony "redemption" narratives beloved by the folks in the Marketing To The People Who Live With Their Cats demographic. I am not optimistic about this. After all, before today's race, Miller had to sit there in a kind of public shaming session with Tom Brokaw, whose presence in Vancouver seems daily like something left over from when they filmed The X-Files there.

Do we need the lugubrious faux Heartland presence of The Man Who Invented World War II? What purpose does this serve, except to provide a junket for aging anchordudes? This is, after all, a guy who wrote a book purportedly about the 1960's in which one of his primary sources was the late Tim Russert, who had as much to do with The Sixties as Andrea Mitchell had to do with Iron Butterfly.  (Anyone who knows if I'm wrong about the latter, please get in touch, with photos.)  But there he was, droopily leading poor Bode, who was just trying to get ready for a ski race, through all the appropriately remorseful dumbshow about parenthood, a concept that Tom Brokaw also invented in a workshop in South Dakota.