Letters to the Editor

The tragic collapse of America's standing in the world A new comprehensive worldwide Pew poll demonstrates the destruction under the Bush presidency of America's strong and robust moral credibility. Glenn Greenwald [2007-07-05]

• The Problem Nation

  I tend to agree with Timberman regarding Glenn's somewhat lazy conflation of issues as some kind of demonstration of The (Fringe) Leftist View of How Murka Is Seen In The World.

  Glenn might do well to submit to some dismantlement of his argument by, oh I don't know, Amy Goodman or somebody on The Left he knows.

  What he may find is that what he is critiquing is not what The (Fringe) Left believes the rest of the world has always believed about the US, but what the Activist Left has long said American actions in the world do -- regardless of popular opinion at home or abroad.

  Activists on the Left have long said that the United States is the chief Problem Nation in the World, and that its foreign policies are grotesque. A long discussion of why and what specifically constitutes Grotesque American Foreign Policy then ensues, generally with extensive demonstrations of the effects of American foreign policy in Third World villages and testimony from Natives to support the premise.

  The Case Against America is Thereby Proved and the Plaintiff Rests. Jury deliberations return a verdict of, "Mmmm, Could Be," and the process repeats. What the Natives believe about America may or may not coincide with the Case Against America just offered, either in general or in specific instances.

  I don't think that Floyd, for example, is arguing what Glenn seems to think he is, and I have never heard Goodman (nor most of her guests) argue the case Glenn says a fringe leftist element claims.

  So who, specifically, has been claiming an ancient, enduring hatred for America in some or all of the rest of the world?

  They have, on the other hand, made excellent cases that American foreign policies, for generations, some would say since the Foundation, have been and are responsible for calamitous results in much of the rest of the world, and that some of the resentment of America that we see now and in the past is due to the calamitous results of American foreign policies. But foreign opinions of America do not necessarily directly correlate with American foreign policy disasters. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

  Yet there is no doubt that America's "moral standing" has undergone a precipitous collapse under the Guiding Hand of the Bush/Cheney Regime, a collapse that will not be easy to rectify.

  -- Ché Pasa
  [Read Ché Pasa's other letters]
  Permalink Flag Thursday, July 5, 2007 12:15 PM
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