🚀 go-pugleaf

"magnate" <chrisc@dbass.demon.co.uk> wrote in message 
news:1146662151.529458.109930@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> Bill Huffman wrote:
>> I for one appreciate that the UK is rooting for the USA. It is nice when 
>> the
>> schoolyard bully has someone that is on their side, at least from the
>> bully's point of view. This is the magic of Bush in a nutchell. He's 
>> managed
>> to turn the USA from the image of victim-trying-to-prevent-atrocities 
>> into
>> the image of a schoolyard-bully-extorting-lunch-money.
>
> Heh, that's about the size of it. I'd go so far as to say that the
> break-up of the Soviet Union was actually a disaster for the USA.
> Before that, you could all just point and say "look, they're the Evil
> Empire, we must oppose them", and the rest of the world turned a blind
> eye to all the destabilisation and other stuff going on elsewhere in
> the world. Now there's no Evil Empire, US foreign policy is under much
> greater scrutiny.
>
> Nowadays it's unfortunate that you have such a bunch of greedy assholes
> in charge, but to be fair to Dubya, the US wasn't exactly "victim
> trying to prevent atrocities" when he took over. There was a gradual
> decline over the preceding half century from that! Still, there are
> loads of really cool americans (none of whom have voted republican in
> the past 30 years).

I'm not going to argue against that more global higher level observation 
but, I was referring to the image of the USA for those few months directly 
after September 11, 2001. Those few months where the USA might have still 
have been the schoolyard bully at heart but the support for the USA came 
from almost everyone else in the schoolyard.