The Critic-Proofing Of Lance Armstrong

newVideoPlayer("/Nike_deadspin_2.flv", 506, 423,""); The ad you see here is the new Lance Armstrong spot for Nike, which would be merely standard-issue, inspiromatic marketing schlock if it didn't come so creepily close to suggesting that to criticize Lance now is to somehow enable cancer. Maybe this is an ungenerous reading. But it's hard not to see the commercial as another expression of Armstrong's galactic persecution complex, one that completes the process whereby the cyclist has wrapped himself so completely in his own worthy cause that anyone who questions the one is necessarily questioning the other. Slate.com's Bill Gifford is exactly right to argue this is a move cribbed from the playbook of resentment politics ("Sarah Palin in spandex?" the headline asks). Gifford writes of the commercial: Over somber piano music, we see black-and-white scenes of doctors at an operating table, cancer patients in hospital gowns, a bald man hoo...