Many people do sense something alien in Obama but are too quick to impute all sorts of impulses and ideologies with no proof of same. Personally, I doubt that he has the sort of feeling toward our country and its traditions that I do. I wish he had said something better in response to Chavez. I would have said, “Sorry we failed the Cuban people. They suffered decades of oppression because of it.” Then up close in a whisper, “If you make us come for you little man, I promise you we will make a good job of it.” Followed by a warm pat on the shoulder for the cameras.

The irony is that “pragmatic” party people like L and P finger wage at people like me who refused to support McCain and ramble on about following the Constitution as originally intended as hopeless ideologues, but it is hard to conceive of anything more hopelessly windmill jousting than their Pax Americana fantasies. Babbling about making the world safe for democracy is at least as impractical and ideology laden as is your average Paul supporter’s constitutionalist rhetoric.

This is spewing. It is neither right wing, nor left wing. It is sophomore year civics mush. Would Lowry and Ponnuru have had Obama plunge his face into this mush before answering Ortega, and to what end? So that he could then launch himself into some blab about how America has moved on to other excellent adventures from what everyone with a brain concedes was a misbegotten, juvenile, mismanaged, historic screw up, distinguished in its planning by nothing whatever but good intentions (sound familiar). “You are aware, Mr Ortega, of the tenets of the American Creed, which has since established our exceptionalability, and that you are, alas, an unexceptional piece of s….”
The fact of the matter is that Lowry and Ponnuru in their blab talk come very close to investing the federal government with divine right to remake the world in the image of our constitution; in the meanwhile, they don’t trust it to regulate Goldman Sachs. The Chinese would call that a contradiction.

Ridiculous hyperbole declaring us the freedomiest country ever instill eyerolling or cheering, not understanding and application. Acknowledging the dark past of the nation isn’t denigration, it’s necessary to let the good bits through.

What they actually wrote in their original essay was this: ‘Our country has always been exceptional. It is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth.’

This was not ‘hyperbole’; it was the very essence of their claim to exceptionalism. If they now characterise it as an exaggeration, they are undermining the first principles of their whole case for exceptionalism.

Then again logic has never figured as strongly as ‘values’ and emotion in the world-view of many self-described conservatives.