Eliot Spitzer woke up on the dull side of the bed Monday morning, which resulted in this disastrous essay over at Slate: "America Undone: President Obama's Disastrous Trip to Asia Reveals the Monumental Decline in American Power". It's hard to tell what the point of it is, really; it's one of those pieces whose clickable headline is gutted of meaning by a moment's thought, and whose accompanying text has little or nothing to do with said headline, or even basic reality.
"America Undone" — a little strong, no? Perhaps "America in a funk," or "America no longer the sole foreign-reserve option." Even "America weakened." But, last time I checked, the trains were still running, I could still buy a newspaper, we could still fund and run a couple foreign wars as well as pay the interest on our historically not-very-large debt. We are not undone, although we may be getting there.
As for that sub-headline, well, if the relative decline of America's sole-superpower status is news to Eliot Spitzer, it becomes easier to understand why CNN gave him a show. The first rule of cable punditry is that America is Number One, always, forever, no questions asked. It's this assumption that allows any failure of any president to get absolutely everything he wants in foreign negotiations to be presented as some sort of shameful personal abasement. (Except when Israel rebuffs a given president, in which case it's a victory for hard-nosed realism and democracy in the Middle East. But I digress.) Here's Spitzer, not even trying to add his own twist to the tradition...
Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/eliot-spitzer-obama-asia-trip-111610?src=rss
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