The Amazing Douchebag

I don't feel compelled to comment on every episode of The Amazing Race, because there's just too much that happens during the course of an hour. But I have to speak out, again, about the presence of Douchebag and Amber in Race #7. Here's my problem: Douchebag (not so much Amber, who is beginning to look more and more like a dim bulb) is turning an honest, straight-up competition into a Survivor-like game of deception. In the last episode, he paid a security guard to not give out an important piece of information to the other teams and lied about it to their faces. Then, he joined with two or three other teams (I've already forgotten) to bribe a bus driver to only open the front exit, and not the back exit, so that the teams in the back would get out only after the teams in the front. Not so bad, right? Well, he used the other teams' money to pay the driver, pocketed his own cash and then gleefully and smugly admitted it to the camera.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Survivor fan, and the alliances/lying/intrigue, etc., make it the excellent TV it is. But I always saw The Amazing Race as an entirely different thing: an honest race, almost a sporting event, where the teams follow the rules and try to defeat the competition. Sure, racers have withheld information from other teams, and you can use the strategy of "yielding" teams, but no one to this point has lied and cheated the way Douchebag is. The worst part, other than that he's succeeding, is that future players will start resorting to the same tactics, forever changing the nature of The Amazing Race and taking away the very element that separated it from the pack of reality shows. The only way that doesn't happen is if Douchebag and Amber somehow slip up and get eliminated. Can't happen soon enough.