MarkvW said:
It is possible to see Armstrong as a nasty piece of work (or even a psychopath as some amateur Clinic psychologists diagnose him) and still see Frankie Andreu as an ordinary doping cyclist.
I have yet to see anyone refer to Andreu as a "junkie" seriously. But Betsy Andreu uses that term in her arguments, though. Looks like the Andreu choir is up and running on the clinic again...
Welcome to the Andreu hate machine that has her talking points encapsulated into charged words and inflammatory terms then pounded into the public using the age old technique of the propagandist, repetition of a simple and memorable message. Thus from her and her chief flunky there is the constant use of the word junkie. Million Dollar Heist gets capitalized for emphasis. Another favorite is manipulation, which Betsy constantly uses in interviews to discount anything Armstrong says that adds nuance to the doping landscape. That last is ironic. Manipulation of the public is precisely what she and her online followers are engaged in and is the tactic she and LeMond claim Lance used to victimize them. She is a hypocrite of the most nauseating kind, the type that wear a mask of piety.
The charged word strategy is why Betsy and her pod people have to minimize Frankie's culpability because the terms she uses to tar Lance and those who remain his friends can be fairly applied to her husband.
She and her followers have tried to get around this with a Clintonesque parsing of language. After portraying a race deal as an Oceans 11-like casino robbery, they cut Frankie out of the story by saying he did not "negotiate" the deal. But negotiation was not his part. The record is clear in multiple accounts that were given before Andreu's sycophants had an interest in minimizing Frankie's involvement. Frankie made the initial offer to Team Coors. After deciding that no one on the team was capable of challenging Lance, Coors finalized the deal with Anderson. The team got the best it could out of the day, the essence of being a professional cyclist. Frankie was fully aware of the deal, facilitated the deal, and collected money from deal. In short, Frankie is an insurance fraudster.
The dodge around Frankie doping the majority of his career has become so absurd that by next week he'll be using the purchase of his boyhood tricycle to say he only doped for a fraction of his time on the bike while pretending cortisone use before races in the 80s is not really doping in the same way that using EPO but retiring before the EPO test forced the move to transfusions means he was not really part of the Postal program. The hallmark of a junkie is someone who refuses to admit his drug use, limits acknowledgement of its extent, or rationalizes it. We obviously have that with Frankie, so let's call him what he is, a junkie.
Making charged words the centerpiece of the Andreus' propaganda strategy does seem to have a slight flaw, doesn't it? Of course, with hypocrites you expect that flaw.
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