George Galloway blasts the Senate

I generally agree with Thomas' response to Blatham's highly selective, oversimplified and distorted depiction of his imagined change in the trajectory of American political values and history.

However I take one important exception. Guantanamo is no outrage. In either absolute or relative terms it is hardly detectable compared to the actions of other governments - East and West, North and South - facing even remotely comparable threats. This list includes Britain, France, Greece, the USSR and virtually all of the Eastern European satellites, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, every country in North Africa (except, perhaps Tunisia), just about every other country in the rest of Africa, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Indonesia, .... Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, .......The list includes the great majority of the nations in the world. 600 prisoners held for (now) up to four years in Guantanamo , during a continuing conflict -- This does not even make page three.

The truly remarkable element in the reporting of Gitmo is the amazing lack of historical perspective and comparable understanding that characterizes nearly all of it.

Even speaking as someone with a long record of protesting against Guantanamo Bay on this forum, I don't get your point about "direction". The ambivalence you are talking about has been existing ever since Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, wrote America's declaration of independence. For a more recent example of such ambivalence, why don't you ask CI what Roosevelt did to the Japanese Americans, while fighting the war that would bring democracy to Japan? It is only for America's more vigilant press that the fate of a few hundred Guantanamo detainees is so widely considered an outrgaeous crime against America's political ideals, when the fate of X0,000 Japanese Americans in World War II wasn't. This increased press vigilance is a good development, not a bad one, even if it makes the readers feel worse for all those horrors reported.

The high-minded political ideals that have inspired generations of American politicians have always been in conflict with the actions of the very same politicians, which have too often made a hash out of them. The ideals continue to conflict with the actions, and Guantanamo Bay is a good recent example. But I disagree there is a long-term direction to the worse here, and that this direction is especially pronounced under the Bush administration. This contention is incompatible with the outrages that happened in the past, and it fails to distinguish between the American government's propensity to commit outrages and the American press corps's propensity to investigate and publish about those outrages. Your contention may satisfy your political prejudices, but America's political history is not as tidy as your thoughts about it.

There is a wonderful cover illustration on the latest New Yorker. The central figure is Uncle Sam sitting in front of a big birthday cake and with streamers and balloons hanging festively above him, party plates are arranged neatly about the table but he looks a tad old and weary. It takes a second or two to realize the point of the illustration - no one has come to his birthday party.

Canadians, by survey, now consider Bush as dangerous to world peace as Osama. Around the world, opinion of American policy and behavior is consistently and deeply negative, moreso than in any other period of time, certainly any period with which I am familiar.

That is not nothing.

So whats behind it all Blatham?

Why is America behaving in this way now?

sheesh steve! A grand unified theory of fukkupedness?

I don't know. Population levels and organizational complexities and the imaginative limitations of the human animal? Certainly Eisenhower's warning fell into a hole happily dug by all those slathering swine who profit from war...our propensity to assume a father figure stands benevolent guard and thus our easy seduction into totalitarian systems...finely tuned advertising and consent-manufacturing techniques in the hands of the same sorts of bastards who have always slithered into power...Karl Rove being yet unsatisfied even after all those nights and afternoons spread awkwardly across an oak desk by Jeffy Gannon...fast food...suppression of the vote such that blacks are 800 X more likely to have their votes uncounted as are whites....the answer is somewhere in there.

Laughing at Canada seems to tickle a great many Americans, and it is my experience that their hilarity is in inverse proportion to their knowledge of Canada.