In God They Trust

November 21, 2011

How the conservative belief in American exceptionalism has become a matter of faith.
By Christopher Hitchens

A small group of colonies manages to break away from a large empire in the closing years of the 18th century. The resulting state would probably be not much more than the Chile of the Northeast—a long littoral ribbon between the mountains and the ocean—if it were not for the imperial rivalries that allow for the rapid growth of the new republic’s influence.

Read More (Slate)

Posted by Tom at 19:09

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4 comments:

Surplus Society said...
November 23, 2011 at 7:30 AM  

Coincidentally I just finished reading and reviewing Hitchens’ books Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography, and Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (see my blog). Both are enjoyable essays despite noticing that in the book on Rights of Man Hitchens got the purchase price of Louisiana wrong, even though he had it right in his earlier book about Jefferson.

 
civil libertarian said...
November 25, 2011 at 5:34 AM  

The sad fact is this: Obama is not facing a serious challenge. Consequence: His conservative opposition is a collective joke. Therefore, he will not be held accountable for his position on Iran. The notion that islamofacism is a right-wing creation will also go unchallenged. Neither will he be held accountable for failing to realize that most of the truly fucked up corporations were the benefactors of the very programs that Obama wants to use. You can target welfare for the people who are truly needy, but there is needless corporate welfare. Excuses for it tend to sound like this: "Well, if we didn't just give money to corrupt corporations, then they would collapse and we would have anarchy!" What about the anarchy of just giving people money? You don't think that will have consequences? Here's a couple of them. One, you won't fix the problem. Two, no matter how much people might like having a little extra money, it won't matter if the problems that surround us grow larger, perhaps even partially resulting from the dolling out of said money. Sometimes the cure is not only worse than the sickness, it actually makes the sickness worse. Everybody on the right and left knows that all the tax hikes on all the wealthy americans which could possibly be utilized (if the bush tax cuts expire) would still get us nowhere near where we need to be. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, totalitarianism is on the rise and growing with each passing day. Whoever said that this was the most remarkable time to live in might've said more than they knew.

 
Eduardo said...
November 30, 2011 at 11:13 PM  

conservative opposition is always a joke, its just that the voters who vote them in are even a bigger joke when it comes to using their brains.

Not saying the Democrats don't have some real mentally challenged people on their side but at least they take time to look up the information they are spouting as reality.

 
Tim said...
December 14, 2011 at 4:16 PM  

Right ,left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, believers, non believers,white, black, yellow,brown, stupid, smart and any and all categories one can think of it finally comes down to money. "The love of money is the root of ALL evil". I guess you can dress it up sometimes and call it power but show me a lot of power without a lot of money. Never happened.

 

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Christopher reads from Hitch-22: A Memoir