In England, Millwall Football Club (home to a particularly violent gang of soccer hooligans) has a slogan 'No-one likes us, we don't care'.

It seems to sum up Bush's USA perfectly. Most Americans have never been abroad, most are parochial, narrow minded prudes, many still believe in God, think ignorance is bliss, and still can't understand -if they ever stop to think about it - why people in Canada and Europe dislike them so much. When I was a kid in the 1960's and 1970's, to most of the rest of the world (SE Asia and the Communist bloc excepted), Americans were still the good guys. Not any longer, I'm afraid. The scales fell from our eyes a long time ago. Most of us now wouldn't trust the USA as far as we could throw you. The 9/11 goodwill dried up pretty fast. Extrordinary rendition, torture flights, Halliburton, Cheney, Rumsfeldt...oh yeah, McDonalds, too.

However, in the article, I just loved:

"With this same idea in mind, an American in Sudan adds that we should put particular emphasis on sending ethnically diverse Americans abroad."

I thought the USA already did, courtesy of George Bush and the US Army.

I don't know where you lived, but American students traveling to Europe 35 years ago were haranged over Vietnam. But I never did hear a satisfactor explanation as to why West Berlin was morally more worthy of protection than Saigon.

In the early 1980s western European foreign exchange students said, "We don't think your system is better than than the Soviet system. We think both have advantages and disadvantages, and maybe the best system is somewhere in the middle." Well, I took it as a pretty nasty insult for America to be equated to the Soviets. It makes it pretty clear that all the specific criticisms we've received are just a smokescrene for I-don't-know-what, but whatever it is, it surely isn't about our standards of behavior.

fsilber might want to tell is the countries and dates of his travels. "American students traveling to Europe 35 years ago" means fsilber or someone else? "Early 1980s western European foreign exchange students said, "We don't think your system is better than ... " Was this said directly to fsilbe; did he know the people speaking personally?

personal experience is always BEST, don't we all think.

It's not really accurate to compare the USA to a second-rate football club. The American position is more like: "No one likes us except Sarko, and we don't care, because they are old Europe, and they let us keep military bases on their soil and run our wars from there anyhow so their whining is irrelevant."

And please, your little Euro and "Pound Stuhhhling" are getting too expensive. Please take care of that before we get really mad ...