Just How Badly Has Snowden Wrecked American Power?

Just How Badly Has Snowden Wrecked American Power?

This is an awesome article.

Granted, a lot of people won't like its point, but its point is valid.

Unfortunately, for the US, it is hard to lead when there is nothing really to lead against, and that is the defining challenge facing the US. Unlike the Cold War, when there really were bad guys (even though there are enough people now trying to rewrite history to rehabilitate socialist ideologies) and they eventually collapsed as the tyranny they sponsored self-destructed (which tyranny is wont to do over time).

The point being is that the US really has been on the side of the rule of law and human rights (even as imperfect as our record is, really has anyone else done much better with polyglot mutt of a society as ours?).

No, Americans are not perfect and anyone who tells you so, either is ignorant or lying (I am not sure which), but as Winston Churchill said about democratic forms of government: All the others are so much worse.

It is hard these days to be proud to be an American ... especially when we see the country as a whole falling away from the precepts that made it what it is. Whether myth or reality, the idea that the individual was important; that the individual was at the heart of society; that without individual liberty and freedom of conscience, all else was irrelevant. Each person is endowed, as the that famous document is oft quoted, by their creator (for the uninitiated that means GOD by whatever term you want to use) with the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (otherwise known as property).

We own our own labor. Not the family or the clan or the community or the state or the nation. We deserve its rewards.

Yes, as members of all those levels human association, we do have obligations to each, but the choice to fulfill those obligations is ours and not the association's to compel. So, we have an obligation to defend our association, but the association can not compel us to do so. We still have the option to opt out. It is our choice.

You may not like that view point, but it is the one that works best for all those levels of human association.

Nuf said