Article: How America lost the war of ideas

[Bill Mattocks]

I agree with this article to an extent that I seldom do. This mirrors much of my own thinking, and it goes much further in scholarship and research than I have.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/roger-...dBlitzEmail&utm_content=201210&utm_campaign=0

If you read it (it's not short, but also not a trudge), you will need to remove your Bush or Obama buttons from your vest first. This is not a partisan hit-piece. I suspect the author is more pro-Obama than pro-Bush (he states it to some extent up front), but he deals fairly with both, I feel. Even where he feels Bush messed up, he prefaces it with an understanding of what background Bush's cabinet came from and what their expectations were. I think it's reasonably fair; but more importantly than being fair, I think his conclusions are accurate.

Read it with an open mind if you can (I am saying that gently, not mockingly). Tell me what you think.

 

[Nomad]

A well-thought out and well researched paper that fails to convincingly place the blame on either Bush or Obama decisively; this article will likely be ignored since neither side can use it as effective ammunition against the other.

Thanks Bill.

 

[granfire]

A well-thought out and well researched paper that fails to convincingly place the blame on either Bush or Obama decisively; this article will likely be ignored since neither side can use it as effective ammunition against the other.

Thanks Bill.

Sad but true.
Maybe if it had laid blame on both sides equally?

 

[Empty Hands]

The last line of the article is the most important: "Changing the perception requires changing the reality."

It is the height of arrogance to think that with the right combination of ********, we can convince others to like us. If we want to be loved and respected, we should strive to be respectable. "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Ad execs or scholarship programs won't change that basic reality.