"Manning and Snowden peeled back the curtain of empire and showed us its inner workings. Understandably, we didn’t much like what we saw, but the real question is what we’re going to do about it. More specifically, they gave Americans a brief glimpse of our country as the rest of the world sees it, a boorish and blundering military-intelligence superpower so convinced of its moral superiority that it respects no universal human rights, no law and no authority except its own. That is so drastically at odds with most Americans’ self-perception of their homeland as the land of liberty and the Johnny Appleseed of democracy – the country of the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address and “Ich bin ein Berliner” – that we’re in grave danger of shutting our eyes to it and retreating into comforting mythology."
Posted on: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 12:27:12 +0000