American liberals and people outside the United States often roll their eyes in patronizing sufferance when an American, such as Senator-elect Marco Rubio (R-FL), states that the USA is the greatest country in the history of the world. It’s dismissed as naive and provincial, a chest-thumping nationalism about as out of date in a transnational world as the horse and buggy after the coming of the auto.
Colman McCarthy at the Washington Post:
Well, it is for Ezra Klein, one of the Washington Post’s bloggers. You see, it’s over 100 years old and the language is just too confusing:
The LA Times has an interesting article today about incoming Governor Brown’s proposed budget – interesting mainly for what it hints at and leaves out, and secondarily for a bit of media bias. First, the proposal:
There are thankfully few genuine hell-holes among the nations of the Earth. One of them is, of course, North Korea. Among the others, Zimbabwe has to be among the worst. After years of horrific misrule that has turned what was once the breadbasket of southern Africa into a Dystopia of starvation and fear, some hope arrived in 2009 when the government of dictator Robert Mugabe was forced to enter a coalition government with Morgan Tsvangirai, a democratic reformer. It was just a glimmer, but it nonetheless held out the possibility of restoring democratic government to Zimbabwe, fixing its trashed economy, and healing its brutalized people.
If yesterday’s post didn’t convince you, maybe Mary Katharine Ham’s “The top 10 UN-believable moments of 2010” will. Here’s one:
