"Proudly posing as being the biggest dicks on the planet doesn't have to be the way we go about expressing our opinions or gaining respect."

Different issue. Not at all the same thing as precisely what is the benefit otherwise. Let me take this down a notch, k? Show me the loved countries, the ones that truly operate according to your dictat. Let's even say there is one or two. What is their role in the world? I don't think it's a complicated point, do you?

"We don't have to be dickwads in order to gain and retain respect, do we?"

See above.

"I mean, I've noticed that is your approach. You with the "don't fuck with me" facade"

Oh it's not a front, it's reality. My family's rabbi in Rouen was beat up the street a few years ago. In front of a bunch or ordinary citizens who didn't do a thing. I think this is generally the shape of the world. It's how people and countries act and behave, or don't behave as it were. I have never actually seen an entire country operate on your Turn the Other Cheek principal but it you point one out I'll listen. Thanks.

"of showing the 'furiners' what you're about."

I am a foreigner. Lived out of the US more than in. But the weird thing, and I guess most people never encounter this, is that most of the world really isn't interested or paying attention to your apologies either. You imagine that because you don't like your country that everyone is waiting with baited breath to hear you feel bad about it and say you're sorry. How silly is that. No one actually cares. Do you? Do you meet people in foreign lands and the first thing they say to you is "Stand and deliver thou blackguard! Tell me you deny your nation and your King!!!" Do you? Really?

"But there are other ways to be respected. Dontchathink?"

Again, and again. To what end? Do you honestly think that China will work to change its human rights record between now and 2008 in order host a 'better' Olympics? Do you think they even care what you think? They broadcast the Tiananmen massacre to the whole world...and that resulted in.....? And the Chinese changed which internal policy.......? And which countries shut down relations.....?

No I tend to think 'respect' is more like a brand affinity. There are countries we automatically think of in those terms, regardless of the facts on the ground. Ireland, there's one. Sweden there's another. South Africa actually owns the word 'apartheid' and all the honor that accrues with it. Even though ZA is Robert Mugabe's biggest supporter. Even though ZA routinely sides with Syria when any issue of human rights abuses in Lebanon comes up. And so on and on. See? It's like a bucket you drop things into.

I've seen it before. Where was it? Oh yes

Albania

Iraq

North Korea

Iran

Communist China

Libya

Mozambique

So I'm not sure the position of "Well I want to feel like a good flag waver for my country, I want the whole world to see how proud I am" is meaningful.

Now in the modern non tyrannical world, one that actually does care and doesn't merely put a patriotic face on fascism the upside to governing to be liked is, you get to be liked. People like you. They vacation where you live. They buy your t-shirts. The problem with that is you can never do anything to harm that world view. You can never put your own interests before your hope the perceptions that others have is a positive one. You have to manage to that critical success factor. Can you imagine Hugo Chavez backtracking on nationalization? Or Iranian mullahs conceding that unlike @ Salon, Jews are not the root of all evil. You can't risk undermining your own support. So being 'liked' is a one way street.

And his $250,000 fine has already been paid. Because of the law it turns out there's no clear way to give someone monitored probation if they have never been given a sentence. Even if that sentence was suspended which is common, you can give a defendant probation because technically they have 'seved' a suspended sentence. In Libby's case the sentence was erased in it's entirety yet the conviction stands.

It will interesting to see hundreds of defendants in Federal court clamoring for Libby treatment to a) erase the sentence because of 'hardship' or because the sentence (under the precise guidelines) is excessive and then b) to eliminate all probation because of that exact wrinkle in the law.

Interesting. In some third world countries, like Mobutu's Zaire, friends of the government were given "Orders of the Leopard" which legally prohibited them from being arrested but for the personal say so of the President himself.

I think we in America are inches from that. You can still see daylight between that whore's thighs, but it's getting slim.

Albania loves Bush because he's handing them Kosovo.

Foreigners respond to you personally pretty much the same shallow reflexive insipid way bloggers treat people they think represent something they don't like. Ok, I'll try to get worked up about that. Maybe it's you people. When I'm in Europe, speaking unaccented American English and I'm wearing a kippah people leave me alone. They don't rush up to me to shout at me about how much they hate the US or Israel etc. But I don't ask or particularly care what they think either. Maybe I just give off that 'don't fuck with me' vibe. If you're asking total strangers for personal thoughts of you you shouldn't be alarmed if it's distasteful. Me? Got zero time or interest in that.