If you spend much time overseas, you get quite a different picture of America than you might expect. There are still traces of gratitude for heroism and help in the past. But the world is more cynical, aware, and doubting. Most important and troubling is the damage done by at least one of our chosen leaders — or more accurately, the damage done by everyday Americans when they reelected the perverse, incompetent administration of George W. Bush.
The book, drawn from 91,000 interviews in 50 countries conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, examined attitudes toward Americans after President George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004. The authors found that opinion abroad was encapsulated the next day by the British tabloid The Daily Mirror in a headline: “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?”
Anti-Americanism, directed at United States government policies, had been pervasive for years, the authors wrote, but the world had always “held Americans in higher esteem than America.” Now, they wrote, foreigners are “increasingly equating the U.S. people with the U.S. government.” …NYT
In other words, Bush was not the only embarrassment to America. We all have a share in that embarrassment.