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More from the Times

Jill

Today, it’s Tom Friedman who sticks it to the President:

These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending “intelligent design” as a theology than practicing it as a policy.

So true. And my goodness do I love Maureen Dowd:

The administration’s foreign policy is entirely constructed around American self-love – the idea that the U.S. is superior, that we are the model everyone looks up to, that everyone in the world wants what we have.

But when people around the world look at Iraq, they don’t see freedom. They see chaos and sectarian hatred. And when they look at New Orleans, they see glaring incompetence and racial injustice, where the rich white people were saved and the poor black people were left to die hideous deaths. They see some conservatives blaming the poor for not saving themselves. So much for W.’s “culture of life.”

10 thoughts on More from the Times

  1. And by ‘people around the world’, she of course means ‘jealous Europeans who have always hated America’, right? Dowd isn’t just a moron, she’s a moron that does real harm to the left side of the spectrum. People read her and assume you’re all as dumb as she is. There are those on the right that do the same for us, no doubt about it. But I don’t quote them in glowing terms on my blog.

  2. “Jealous Europeans”? What, pray tell, are they jealous of? Reactionary leadership? A president who can’t be bothered to end his vacation after the worst American natural disaster in a century? An administration that took almost no steps to mount a rescue/recovery operation until it became clear that the American public did in fact care that other people — as poor and black as they might have been — were dying unnecssarily? A nation that jails both foreign nationals and American citizens without due process? A nation that still tolerates torture?

    I sure as hell hope not.

  3. I have to pick on the racial comment. How is it a racial injustice that ” the poor black people were left to die hideous deaths”? Over 65% of New Orleans is black. You can’t accuse a hurricane for attacking a mostly black city. You can blame the administration for a lot of things but this one’s just not right.

  4. By “people around the world” I suspect she means a whole lot more than just Europeans. People throughout the Middle East aren’t our biggest fans right now. A lot of Latin Americans don’t find our foreign policy to be particularly helpful. The Iraq war is internationally unpopular, in a whole lot of places other than Europe (just look at our grand coalition of the willing).

    And just out of curiosity, have you visited Europe and actually talked to people there in the last four years? Because they certainly aren’t jealous. They don’t hate America, but they sure as hell don’t want to be us. They love their country and their culture like we love ours — I know this comes as a surprise to a lot of right-wingers, but not everyone in the rest of the world sits around dreaming about how great it would be to be American. Some sure do, but it’s not universal. And while many Europeans like Americans and like visiting America, they can’t stand our foreign policy. I think that’s fair.

    Disliking something isn’t always about jealousy. I’m guessing that you dislike Communism — jealous, are ya?

  7. I don’t think the issue is the “jealous foreigners.” The real issue is self-love. This administration has coasted on the image of “America, land of the free, home of the brave” yadda yadda yadda. And they think, they genuinely think, that the myth and the behavior match.

    In short, they’re guilty of believing their own publicity. If this administration could be a film character, it would be Norma Desmond.

  9. I lived in Europe during the Clinton years and I can tell you that they did not feel so differently toward America then than they do now. Yes, they get to focus on our president more now instead of just hating us. It is jealousy combined with hatred that they feel for us, don’t kid yourselves. It’s a ‘how can this country, filled with stupid people be so successful, so rich and so powerful when clearly we should be in charge and running the show’. So, no, I wasn’t talking about ‘oooh we so want to be American’ jealousy, more the ‘I should have what they have because I’m clearly so much better’ kind.

  10. Karol, you’re trippin’. I’m a US expat living in Norway, and I can tell you that most Norwegians feel pity for Americans, and contempt for those currently in power in the American government. What is there to be jealous of? Here we have good, free health care, good, free education, respectable foreign and environmental policies…the list goes on and on. The US dollar is so weak compared to the krone right now that we go on shopping trips to the US like it was a third world country! Norwegians, at least, do not want what America has, not by a long shot, and they certainly don’t view America as a success, not anymore. They believe that the country is going down the toilet.

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