"I was told that 12 years ago many Egyptians looked forward to the election of George W. Bush, remembering with fondness his father's tough stance with Israel over settlements. They could not have been more disappointed."
--Sarah A. Topol, "Democracy in America? Watching 'The West Wing' With Egyptians in Cairo," The Atlantic online, 11/02/2012
Apparently massive military multi-year intervention is not the most delightfully effective way to win hearts and minds.
I'm not a Republican nor a Democrat, but I'm pretty skeptical of the State Department using the 'The West Wing' to teach democracy to citizens of other nations, especially since most people with a modicum of political perception and experience know that that show was tilted decidedly Democrat. It was well written, acted and directed and had every right to express its viewpoint, but that does not mean that the taxpayer supported State Department, that is said to represent all Americans, should be unprofessionally presenting that dewy-eyed television drama as some sort of American Elections 101.
Pretty late in the day for the following sentiments, as the U.S. devolves into an almost irretrievably fractured bureaucratically bloated broke open-bordered overpopulated ever-warring multicultural empire, but I would have preferred a nation that held to the old colonial motto "Don't tread on me," and otherwise kept foreign entanglements to a minimum, and avoided like the plague utopian meat-grinder socio-military adventures like 'nation-building'. Let people in their own nations find their own way. We are not gods. They are not our children.
Rather than alternating between massive military force and comically running around the globe being goody-two-shoes busybodies, the Founders wanted a strong stable coherent America to lead by example. We should have listened.
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