I generally like your essays (you know, the funny ones) but really, once I re-read your post and determined you weren't being sarcastic, I had to wonder whether you've ever been out of the country. I mean, Americans showing up meant the beatings would stop? Where? Central/Latin America? Southeast Asia? Greece? The Middle East? The only place in living memory is perhaps Bosnia. What you're describing is a short period in our history immediately following WWII. It didn't take long for the world to realize that the Pax Americana ADDED to the beatings and the misery. The word most often employed is "bully." (I would agree with antineocon that the turning point came around Vietnam). I live in Europe and the sentiment you describe about Sept 11 is hardly the dominant one. Many people think and say that America got what it deserves.

. . . has a legal right not to be tortured to death:

The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette:
http://wvgazette.com/News/200906290401

June 29, 2009

Greenbrier turkey plant worker sentenced for animal cruelty

A worker at a West Virginia turkey plant was sentenced [...]
[...] Scott Alvin White of Second Creek
[...] indicted on felony charges in February
[...] pleaded guilty to two animal cruelty misdemeanors in April.
[...] sentenced June 8 to a year in jail.

- - The Charleston Gazette, June 29, 2009

__________

I'm glad your campaign was successful. There is so little good news these days.

It is not just the Right that we cannot reason with... lots of ordinary, otherwise progressive people really don't want to hear or read about Torture, because it is so distasteful to them... as if it were not also distasteful to those bothering to post about it, or read about it, or comment on it.

You merit much more than an Izzy for being willing to spend so much time not just holding the media accountable, but also for trying to hold the DOD, the CIA and the former administration accountable... not to mention the current one.

Not that this is a pile on. First, I think that the world's view of the US is pretty schizophrenic. That's especially true in South East Asia, which by all rights should hate our guts--if anyone had a good reason to knock down one of our skyscrapers, it was Cambodia or Vietnam. But yet, nary a peep.

Second, I think you could walk down the street in any third world capital, picking people at random, and they would all have their own nuanced way of looking at the US, some of it positive, some of it negative, most of it mixed--and like most Americans, contradictory and confused. I think in general, our institutions are admired but sort of like the way a poor man looks at the millionaire, thinking that the rich can't appreciate wealth. People like our easy sex and obesity-generating 24 hour party culture, of course, and who can blame them.

To be honest, I actually don't care what the world thinks of the US; nor do I think that we have ever provided a decent model of ANYTHING to the rest of the world--unless you count stuffing your face and lying your ass off for personal gain as a viable way of getting through the universe. The only thing stopping people from already living that lifestyle is that we use up all the drugs, slutty sex and electronic and combustible media that they need to achieve the goal.

What I mean to say at 10:49 pm, is that the idea that we were a light unto nations has always been a largely bullshit construct used like a an ice-pack to salve the hang-over of super-affluence.

Though, I would add, its never too late to start setting a good example.

nor do I think that we have ever provided a decent model of ANYTHING to the rest of the world--unless you count stuffing your face and lying your ass off for personal gain as a viable way of getting through the universe.
___________________________________

That's a hell of a way to describe Conferring the Blessings of Civilization Upon the Persons Sitting in Darkness!*

* h/t to Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain

"All President Obama is doing is playing for time, saving his thunder for his own political agenda. The White House is, alas, a political operation of the highest order. There's no getting around that fact, and the President's hired a teachable operative in Rahm Emanuel. I believe that his campaign for re-election has already begun, but we never saw it coming. There has been no 100-day agenda at all! Karl Rove's idea of a 'permanent campaign' was no exaggeration. The only difference is that the Obama administration will work for the good of the citizens rather than exclusively for the corporations and the wealthiest. Everybody does well when the middle class makes out well. The wealthy will benefit far more, of course, because they own everything."

James Carville said he had no business with a job in the White House, as his function was to elect Bill Clinton. Period. Yet we have David Axelrod as a "senior advisor," or some similar horse-hooey. I am not happy that there is a new "permanent campaign," well before anything in the first campaign has been achieved. I am all but done with Obama on the civil rights/unitary executive/NSA violations/torture prosecution/transparency issues. Support the ACLU!!

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/06/world_opinion/

Friday July 6, 2007

Why has world opinion of the U.S. changed dramatically since 2000?

Following up on the post from yesterday regarding the collapse of America's standing in the world, there are responses from several other bloggers which illuminate the key points further still.

To the extent that I used the Pew Global polling data to demonstrate the core falsity of the neoconservative worldview on international public opinion -- namely, that the world is inherently anti-American no matter what we do, because they hate our political values and/or are driven by jealousy -- the point was clearly understood. But there seemed to be less clarity with regard to my attempt to use this data to refute the view among some on the Left that America's behavior in the world under Bush is fundamentally the same as it was for the last several decades. [...]

[...] Because the U.S. has been a superpower for decades, people around the world have been well aware of our mistakes, excesses, the instances where we violated our own values, the wars we fought (both overt and covert), and most of the other bad acts in which the country engaged.

Much of the world's geopolitics for the last half of the 20th Century was driven by the conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and people around the world were affected by that conflict in countless ways. They were well aware of what the U.S. was doing in the world. The news about the America's conduct may not have been transmitted as immediately as it is now, but it was well known.

Yet despite all of that, much of the world -- majorities in nations around the world -- respected and admired this country and the values it symbolized. That isn't because they were duped into thinking that America was inerrantly Pure Good or because our bad conduct was concealed. Outside of right-wing followers who stupidly equate criticism of the U.S. with hatred for it (even though the opposite is usually true), nobody thought that the U.S. was angelic. No nation or any other group of human beings is.

They maintained favorable views of the U.S. not because they were unaware of its failings, but rather, because the good that the U.S. did in the world outweighed its bad. It is misleadingly one-sided to point to Vietnam or Central American covert wars without simultaneously acknowledging America's role in the defeat of the Nazis, or its opposition to the truly oppressive Communist empire (which suffocated the lives of hundreds of millions of people), and -- I think most importantly -- the political principles and individual liberties embodied by our Constitution and the stable democracy it has secured. World opinion prior to the Bush presidency was so favorable not because people were unaware of America's flaws, but because they were so well-aware of its virtues.

The view that the U.S. has been a net force for evil in the world since the end of World War II and that what George Bush has done is but an extension of the country's values, rather than a perversion of them, is a view that is held by some unknown number of people -- I think a small minority -- but it is a view that one hears with some frequency. [...]

[...] To believe in America's political values and to observe the importance of its role in the world is not "American exceptionalism." Like all countries, America has erred many times and has been capable of evil. Other countries have critically important virtues that America lacks. As I detail in my book, America has been far too quick to use war as a foreign policy option and has become increasingly imperialistic in precisely the way the Founders so stridently warned against.

But those who focus on America's flaws to the exclusion of its virtues are but the opposite side of the same Manichean coin from the American exceptionalists who believe that we can do no wrong, that America is inherently Good independent of our conduct in the world. What the Pew poll demonstrates is that the face America has shown to the world during the Bush presidency -- at least insofar as the world perceives it, a vitally important metric -- is a fundamentally different one than they saw previously.

In the last six years, America's brutality, unrestrained aggression, and violation of our own professed values have been transformed from destructive aberration into our defining attributes. And the world's population sees that transformation quite clearly and, as a result, their view of America has transformed along with it.

- - Glenn Greenwald, Friday July 6, 2007

__________