Yep , and I guess they would call it improvement. True, Paul a lot of countries acted in a imperial ways.. its just not all the US to be worked on..

"trying to turn our country more like the US." This was something that Sarkozy (who has been soaking up the practical get-things-done-Yankee-capitalist spirit by vacationing in rugged New Hampshire) advanced in recent French elections. A great ambition! The U.S. has the greatest maldistribution of wealth in the industrialized world (1 percent of the population owns half the nation's wealth and a larger percentage of its policymakers), the longest working hours in that world, and the narrowest spectrum of acceptable moral and ideological debate by far. Is consigns more than a million of its children to "deep poverty" --- to living at less than half its official notriously inadequate poverty level --- while spending as much on so-called "defense" (really imperial offense) --- on militarism ---- as the rest of the planet. Suicide and depression are rampant; so is gun violence and dangerously neglected infrastructure. The U.S. boasts the world's highest incarceration rate (very racially disparate of course) by far. A telling indication of its domestic inequality and spiritual death: it has the world's second highest (after Norway) per-capita income but ranks 24th globally in life expectancy. It is on the brink of permanent business-run totalitarianism, exhibiting proto-dystopic post-democratic tendencies that render classic (interwar-European-style) fascism redundant and unncessary. And not just coincidentally, it is widely recognized by the global populace as the greatest threat to peace and justice in the world --- a much less desirable planetary hegemon than the officially authoritarian state of China. ...So by all means, Canada, France and all the rest...yes by all means, it's very important that you try to become "more like the U.S." A grand ambition indeed! Your own existing national forms and cultures of oppression, arrogance and hierarchy are not yet sufficiently grotesque...you need to go to new and American levels of ugliness, despair, disparity, alienation, authoritarianism, madness and criminality. Bon chance!

this madness radiates all the way to the north where we Canadians are located.. We have our shares of Conservatives - our the extreme right and so so pro-Bush, a government who coward when Bush sneezes.. It has the guts to send ambulances To Israel but none to palestinians and no help at all.. Our Liberals whom are much like the democrats excepted with not as much support from unions whom parades sell-out like Igniateff and finally a disorganized NDP which carry the most strategic voters , unionists and *leftists. Fortunately, whenever I point out the absurdities of the war in Iraq etc.. most people agree that we are destroying our environment at an alarming rate to the detriment of a survival of species, most agree that it is the earth that feed people and not Bushes planned economies yet our propaganda system sponsored by companies still interfere, reshape our political parties to promotes business agendas.. It is trying to turn our country more like the US.. Most agree that the Arctic pole melting should be an alarm to the extraction of oil and gas.. yet competeing countries want claims to exploration and exploitation of the bottom of the Arctic sea floor, Russia even planted a flag. Corporate fraud is rampant, tax cuts to the rich company were instrumental with the export of our Canadian wealth to the US, while our public services were cut and reduced although we still have some sort of Cnadian health care.. and by comparison to the US and in the light of Michael Moore " Sicko " , The US having no nationalized Health Care is may be the greatest American absurdity of all and because healh care should be a "right" and having not such thing should be labeled anti-american and a threat against its citizens.

There is a limit to how responsible this "American" is willing to feel for the Bush war crime family and other unforgivable transgressions by this freakish criminal enterprise "my" nation of birth has become. As Marx once said, people "make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."

If most of the American people I've been close to and lived and worked with over the last three decades could make history just as we pleased (and not have to deal with the nightmares of a world we never made) --- "under self-selected circumstances" --- there would be no plutocratic winner take all U.S. electoral system. There we would be no classism, no sexism, no racism, no oppression, no hiearchy. We'd have instituted the 15 hour week years ago, extended the human lifespan significantly and discovered a hidden explosion of previously suppressed Shakespeares, Dylans and Picassos, Peles, Jordans, Hendrixes, Joplins, Satchel Paiges etc.

Needless to say, the revolting Bush family phenomenon and the perverse political culture that allows it to exist would have been strangled in the cradle.

But alas we were born into an authoritarian world that produces among many other noxious things: 59 million dangerous American morons who actually went into voting booths to select George freaking Bush the Second for a second term as president; a Democratic Party that is institutionally and ideologically hard-wired to betray its peaceful- and populist-sounding promises; and a dominant media that manufactures mass idiocy on a truly chilling scale. It produces a society where Patrick Buchanan is an MSNBC "news" host and says (as he did 30 or so  minutes ago) that even "John Edwards is going way out to the Left" and where a former U.S. military colonel and goes on CNN (yesterday) to advocate a military draft because too few Americans are willing to sign up for the invasions of Iraq and other actions "to defend the republic"....yes, to "defend the republic." 

It's a world where American Ten O'Clock  news broadcasters talk about the deaths of local GIs in Iraq as if there is something sinister and mysterious about Iraqis daring to attack illegal and mass murderous imperial occupiers on Iraq's supposedly sovereign soil.   The brilliant Norman Finkelststin is expelled from lowly DePaul while the moronic arch-plaigarist Alan Dershowitz reigns at exalted Harvard.  The nation's institutions of "higher education" are ruled by power-worshipping men and women of prehistoric stupidity and cringing cowardice while true scholars of radical genius are left to rot in lonely and anonymous poverty. I could go on....the absurdities are endless.

It produces the American Armed Madhouse, supremely    dangerous to the world and to itself.  

I know, it's our fault.  

Yes and no. But of course, we have no choice but to "start where we are," to quote the Buddhists, and ranting along these lines probably does not help.

I spend so much time beating up on the "liberal" Democrats that I find it necessary to occasionally throw in a piece on some Republicans....people like, oh, the Bushes. In all the Left's understandable disdain for Democrats' perfidious service to corporate-imperial power, it's important not to forget how vile the GOP and its standard bearers are.

Barockstar Obomba wants us to feel empathy for the Bush crime family and suggested (after the 2006 congressional elections) that responsible politicians would still want to be seen as "working with the president." He says (in his ponderous, pedantic and power-worshipping book The Audacity of Hope) that boy king George, Darth Cheney and the recently resigned Rove (who has completed some key missions for the corporate-imperial system) are pretty much regular folk like all of us (and besides, Obama says, we all need to "empathize with our oppressors") but my sense is that most Americans would be happy to see the whole vicious clan deported to Paraguay or some other Latin-American refuge for hard right war criminals. Guantanamo would be a more appropriate destination for the Little League Dad and his eldest Fortunate Son - the one who's supposed to be having such a hard time out there on that little ballfield called world history.

Notice how wanting to call out the evil of the Republicans brings you back to the evil of the Dems, who continue to enable GOP criminality.

Thats what I call a familly resume and - God forbid- Bush resume isn't narrowed.