Which mistakes were not acknowledged?

Oh, I don’t know, maybe BUSH’S ENTIRE FOREIGN POLICY STRATEGY.

So it’s not just screwing up the Iraq war. It’s a utter lack of realization that we are part of the global community, we don’t run the global community.

See, Bush thinks our power and authority is pretty much absolute. Well, it isn’t. And the easiest way for us to lose it is to go around trying to spread freedom on borrowed money, thereby bankrupting us to the point where we can’t maintain our military budgets without falling massively into debt.

Seriously, you can’t see where that strategy leads?

Now, if you really ARE favor of American exceptionalism, you’d do well to abandon Bush’s tactics in favor of something more reasonable and workable. Because that exceptionalism isn’t just a military strategy…it’s the idea that America stands for everything that’s good and just..and that idea extends far beyond our military might. In fact, our military might is probably the worst instrument for spreading the idea of freedom because we end up killing tens of thousands of innocent people when going after the bad guys.

And as far as compromising with “tyrants”…didn’t Nixon meet with Mao? Didn’t Reagan meet with Gorbachev? Give me a break.

What, you won’t accept anything other than a written apology by Bush, “I’m sorry I screwed up in Iraq for the first 4 years of the war,” just so you can say, “I told you so?” Then you are just another Keith Olbermann partisan hack.

Our longterm prospects to fight the tyrannical are hurt only when we consider tyrants to be legitamate global actors with agendas we should compromise with. Obama wants this compromise. He also wants to cut military and inteligence spending by 25% during a time of war – a war which Joe Biden does not believe even exists. Why is it Bush’s fault that Obama wants to do this?

Also, when he talks about the idea of what America was means that he has a deep love of country and he wants to get back there. So when Phillips talks about “original sins”, it’s obviously nonsense if this is the quote you’re arguing she’s pointing at.

What’s funny, and what pretty much any right-winger neo con won’t admit, is the fact that how we’ve conducted ourselves in the past 8 years actually hurts the idea of American exceptionalism. We DO make mistakes, and refusing to acknowledge this only hurts our long term prospects to fight the tyrannical.

“America is no longer what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children.”

-Barack Obama, 08/06/2008