American Views Abroad

 
Single-Minded, An Independent Journal of Fact and Opinion, is back with a weekly essay in Something To Think About at www.singmind.com. This week's essay, Manifest Destiny, is introduced with a quote from a book written in 1960 on how the unique good fortune of never having experienced a fiasco has isolated America rather dangerously. He proceeds to follow this line of thought discussing Bush's foreign policy and what it is driven by, the Vietnam and Cold War era, the fall of the Soviet Union and what resulted from that and concludes with the following:

Too often we have ignored the forces of history at our peril. We didn't understand the roots of the Vietnam conflict. We chose to ignore the historical record of chaos that often comes with the breaking up of empires. We chose to ignore the evidence that Saddam was a small time dictator who just wanted to be left alone. Instead, we pushed forward with our dreams of spreading democracy, even though in our lifetime few if any of those efforts had borne much fruit, and such fruit as there was often turned bitter.

On the nightly news on ZDF, the second channel on public German TV yesterday, the anchorman reported on America electing a new president----or----at least trying to. This comment was followed by a detailed report on what is going on in Colorado. There is a proposal there to change the winner take all in the Electoral College seats Colorado has. Could this law, should it be voted in, have any affect on who gets elected this time around was the question posed, as well as if the present US system really is One Person, One Vote.

- posted by Gloria @ 1:19 PM