World-wide Vote for the next US President?

[riffer]

More quotes from George Bush:

http://homepage.mac.com/njenson/movies/dsbush.html

[riffer]

Even more quotes from George Bush:

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/graphic...805041bush.mov

[ManDownUnder]

I saw an brilliant program a couple of months ago that nicely outlined why democracy and capitalism are diametrically opposed, where there is one you naturally can't have the other.

I can't recall the arguments but they were very compelling and all evidenced in the US political structures.

Remind me... when was the last poor presidential candidate?

My vote for US president... neither of those two clowns... maybe Mandela or anyone else that knows hardship, has seen what it's like to be oppressed, and had the personal strength and resolve to rise above it.

MDU

[Lou Girardin]

Ahh. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Who remembers the unnamed US Captain in Vietnam, quoted as saying "we had to destroy the village in order to save it".
Well, it appears that after 'insurgents' destroyed yet another Bradley in Iraq, an Apache pilot was concerned for the safety of a crowd that gathered around the still burning vehicle some hours later. So to 'save' them from possible ordinance explosions, he rocketed the Bradley. Killed twelve, injured dozens.
'We gave then freedom and they STILL don't like us.'

[MikeL]

We're screwed, some Asian nation is gonna invade us for Lebensraum and I doubt any western nation will help us

-Indy

And on what do you base this opinion?

Should I infer that you think that only getting into bed with Uncle Sam will save us?

[MikeL]

Dunno... maybe I should just stop prattling on and go there for myself

Good idea. And when you're packing for the trip, don't forget the French phrasebook and a few volumes outlining French history, art and culture.

Why do so many Anglo-Saxons return from Europe with tales of arrogance, rudeness and the like?

Partly because they are tourists and the mass tourism industry treats travellers as units of consumption, not real human beings. Is it surprising that your Italian waiter is off-hand, even surly? What difference does it make to him if you come back tomorrow or not?

But the main reason is that most English-speaking travellers go with the wrong attitude. Smug in the superiority of their language, culture, politics, religion or whatever, and scarcely stopping to consider that the purpose of travel is to discover and savour the alienness of a strange land, they refuse to meet the foreigner half-way, or indeed any way at all except on their own cultural territory.

Years ago I was on a bus in Sorrento when a middle-aged Kiwi who had drunk more freely of the vino rosso at lunch than was wise demanded that the bus driver stop so that he could relieve himself. I didn't expect him to be able to explain in Italian what he wanted, but his anger and frustration at the bus driver's inability to understand the phrases "spend a penny" and "take a leak" was incomprehensible to me, as well as acutely embarrassing to most of us on the bus.

Study the culture, learn to speak the language, travel with intellectual curiosity and modesty, and then see whether arrogance and rudeness are the order of the day. I think not.

[Coldkiwi]

you miss my point Mike. rudeness dished out can certainly equal rudeness in return. What the french (or maybe its just the parisians spoiling it for the rest of them) frequently seem to do is dish out rudeness to polite people. And again, I'm sure rude people travel the world over, but when was the last time you heard someone (no matter how abrasive) complain about the 'rude fijians'?