Rustico that is the scariest part. You mentioned that the overused idea that everybody is crazy…

See I don’t think this guy is crazy at all. Reading into Allans post I didn’t get the idea that he thought this guy was crazy either. I agree with you bigtime about the overused idea that everyone is crazy. Yet I don’t believe any of these guys are/were crazy. Kim Jong is way way way uncrazy. He may be a despot, evil, harsh, whatever, but I don’t believe he is crazy and I do believe he is smart. Mr dinner jacket trumps him bitime when it comes to smarts.

Your right about how do we keep a tally… We have certainly not been great… As you said it is hard to grade against alternatives but I do believe it would have been a harsher world had we not won world war 2. Harsher for us? Yes. Harsher for everyone in the world? Perhaps. Many others were persecuted beyond Jews by the Nazis.

All I can say is that we play the hand we are dealt. We haven’t played it well but in the end I do believe America and Americans in general are content to live in a world that can share many religions and races. Greed has indeed really degraded our effort over the past 150 years to be a model nation/superpower as you have certainly brought up above.

Yet… even with all our shortcomings and screw ups, we have done about as well as any other nation would have done and more then likely less worse…

Not exactly a ringing endorsement and I suppose in the next millenia we will all get to see how China will do when they take over the post. My guess is they will do no better.