Quote:
Originally posted by Lanny_MacDonald+Aug 22 2004, 04:47 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Lanny_MacDonald @ Aug 22 2004, 04:47 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Cowperson@Aug 22 2004, 02:10 PM
A government controlled mainstream media source (sic), The Washington Post, with a critical look at USA diplomatic efforts directed at Muslims, including a rare admission of failure in a speech given a few days ago by Condoleeza Rice.
Rice, in a speech yesterday at the U.S. Institute of Peace, conceded that public diplomacy is an area the administration wants to "look harder at" and said, "We are not obviously not very well organized for the side of public diplomacy."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5765055/
Is this kind of story actually anything new or simply a continuation of a multi-administration, multi-president program that inspired writings like "The Ugly American" in 1958?
http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall98/uglyamerican.htm
Secondly, if these are actually "failures" then how is it the USA has emerged as the leading democracy in the world? Do others around the globe love the "American Ideal" but hate the Americans just the same?
Just setting a torch under you guys on a rainy and cold Sunday.
Cowperson
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Them Commies at the Post have no right to print that trash!!!
As I have said in other threads, I believe the American for of democrasy is broken. The two party system is a complete joke and does nothing but divide the nation to the point that nothing gets accomplished. You always end up with one party in the whitehouse and the other running the senate and nothing gets accomplished because of partisan politics. For America to be the "leading" democray in the world it has to be more efficient, more enlightened and more compasionate with its own people and with the world. They really need a third party to break the partisan politics icejam and start focusing on the issues that trouble the nation. If you hold elections, and the guys you elect are useless tools, then what's the use of having an election in the first place? So you can gripe about what a cra job the guy you didn't vote for is doing, or bury your head in the sand and defend the guy just because he is your candidate?
I think Canada's democrasy is much more efficient and superior to that of the United States. If Canada would move to a EEE senate I think it would be the perfect system of government and the model for all others to follow. [/b][/quote]
Yeah but . . . . they ARE the leading democracy in the world.
In the late 80's/early 90's I saw the USA as "an empire in decline" and didn't mind telling people so.
Yet here we are, after crushing communism and a whirlwind of prosperity in the 90's, the USA is still on top even though faced with the latest crisis in a series of such challenges since the end of the Second World War.
The Ugly American, written on the perceptions of the day, came BEFORE the Vietnam War.
It could very well have been written today considering the wild tales we hear of how foreigners view Americans.
As we look around the world, however, we see an inexorible march towards market economies, generally underpinned by varying degrees of democracies, a trend we likely wouldn't have seen develop without the USA and its puttering, interfering ways.
As I noted, the global complaints of the USA foreign policy are decades old, generations old and yet they hardly seem to dent the trend.
Why is that?
Secondly, not to be a knob, but its perfectly possible for 15 political parties to surface in the USA and divide the country exponentially. Or to have four influential parties as Canada does.
To say the USA has a "two party system" makes it sound legalized or something.
For the longest time, Canada had two parties duking it out with the occasional third party swinging things in a minority situation. One could argue that having four influential parties, as we see today, divides Canada considerably.
One could also argue that having a Democratic President and a Republican Congress or vice versa represents the ultimate check and balance on one party running amok and acting as though it operates a "dictatorship," the oft-voiced complaint of recent Liberal majorities in Canada.
Is there such a thing as a perfect democracy?
Cowperson
