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Originally Posted by scaeagles
Ridicule amongst the rest of the world....I hardly care. Most of the rest of the world is run by dictators and would be considered second or thrid world.
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Sceagles, I thought of you when I ran into the following article from
Spiegel in Germany:
America Loses Its Dominant Economic Role
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George W. Bush has grown old, erratic and rosy in the eight years of his presidency. Little remains of his combativeness or his enthusiasm for physical fitness. On this sunny Tuesday morning in New York, even his hair seemed messy and unkempt, his blue suit a little baggy around the shoulders, as Bush stepped onto the stage, for the eighth time, at the United Nations General Assembly.
He talked about terrorism and terrorist regimes, and about governments that allegedly support terror. He failed to notice that the delegates sitting in front of and below him were shaking their heads, smiling and whispering, or if he did notice, he was no longer capable of reacting. The US president gave a speech similar to the ones he gave in 2004 and 2007, mentioning the word "terror" 32 times in 22 minutes. At the 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations, George W. Bush was the only one still talking about terror and not about the topic that currently has the rest of the world's attention.
"Absurd, absurd, absurd," said one German diplomat. A French woman called him "yesterday's man" over coffee on the East River. There is another way to put it, too: Bush was a laughing stock in the gray corridors of the UN.
The American president has always had enemies in these hallways and offices at the UN building on First Avenue in Manhattan. The Iranians and Syrians despise the eternal American-Israeli coalition, while many others are tired of Bush's Americans telling the world about the blessings of deregulated markets and establishing rules "that only apply to others," says the diplomat from Berlin.
But the ridicule was a new thing. It marked the end of respect.
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This is no longer the muscular and arrogant United States the world knows, the superpower that sets the rules for everyone else and that considers its way of thinking and doing business to be the only road to success.
A new America is on display, a country that no longer trusts its old values and its elites even less: the politicians, who failed to see the problems on the horizon, and the economic leaders, who tried to sell a fictitious world of prosperity to Americans.
Also on display is the end of arrogance. The Americans are now paying the price for their pride.
Gone are the days when the US could go into debt with abandon, without considering who would end up footing the bill. And gone are the days when it could impose its economic rules of engagement on the rest of the world, rules that emphasized profit above all else -- without ever considering that such returns cannot be achieved by doing business in a respectable way.
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This stuff is horrendous... horrendous what has happened to us. This is a GLOBAL world. We have GLOBAL markets, GLOBAL issues. We've been the last superpower, and we've been squandering it away. You might not personally care what some Gaston thinks in Paree, but all of this affects all of us in the U.S.; our economy, our influence, world politics, etc.
I have to say, if you still think that how we are viewed by the rest of the world is not relevant, then you sir, are living in the 20th century, as a Monroe doctrine isolationist.
What will the rest of this planet think of us when we elect a 72-year-old senior citizen with his hottie trophy VP who appears to be completely disengaged from the world?