A Dysfunctional Democracy

This article starts out as a garden-variety the-Republicans-are-inept-and-so-are-the-Democrats that you and I have both seen hundreds of times before. In fact, we have heard it so many times before that it is easy to become inured to these tales of woe. It is only on the last page of the article - page 3 - that we begin to see something new - something that actually justifies this n-th edition of the same old, same old.

In what must have seemed like a dream to the author, he returns us to the world of the late 1990s, back when Bill Clinton was in office as President of the United States. From there, he recounts a few tales of just how the US was viewed from around the world back then. And while we were obviously not universally loved - see, bin Laden, Usama - there were enough positive poll lines in nations all around the world that most countried viewed us in a positive light. Not easy to maintain a global jihad against the most popular kid on the block and so UBL and his homies were run out of Saudi Arabia and then Sudan, before coming to rest in Afghanistan. From the remote hinterlands of a war torn nation, UBL was able to conceive and execute the attacks of 11 September 2001, but as he looked around on 12 September, the odds of his survival must have seemed bleak. Instead of united the world in opposition to the US, the attacks united the world in support of the US. Okay - that link was from a military alliance, you might expect their support. How about this one?

So what happened? Well, we have all had a chance to see this crazed president take the support the world offered us and told them, "thanks - but no thanks". This article lays out the support the world has for us now: Jordan, Egypt and Russia - which used to either be comfortably within our sphere of friendly nations - now cannot even allow themselves to be seen with us; Pakistan and Turkey find themselves reconsidering just how much they ever really liked us; China shoots down satellites (how does that missle defense system look now?).

Bush has been a travesty for our country; it would take the reincarnation of FDR to restore our nation to prominence in the world.

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