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POPSWhy America Will Survive George W. Bush Otto von Bismarck saw how American blunders led to American power and allegedly said that God has a special providence for drunks, fools, and the United States of America. Walter Russell Mead (of the Council on Foreign Relations) puts Bush's 8-year stint in the White House into proper perspective. America's foreign policy has been short-sighted and often self-defeating from the get-go, alternately collaborative, passive, and interventionist. And, yet, miraculously, we always come out ahead. With the unstoppable rise of a global capitalist economy, Mead makes the case that America, for all its past and current faults, will continue to be the inevitable leader of this new international buoyancy. Not even our latest mistakes (unprecedented though they may be) can derail such a powerful incentive that is the modern American world trade system. Which means, more than ever, we're literally all in this together.
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POPSThe Meaning Of America I've watched it happen over the years since hate radio and its multimillionaire mavens first gave voice and increasing political clout to resentment, intolerance, bitterness, anger, frustration over broken dreams, and unfulfilled entitlement. We've turned mean. We've been encouraged to go onto knee-jerk, scorched-earth attack mode by politicians, activists, and media brokers who gained influence and financial reaffirmation. The loudest and most dominant voices don't urge us to find root causes of problems and their solutions, or to reach for true understanding. All we are told, and all we know anymore, is hitting, and hitting harder, and hurting deeper, killing, demonizing, punishing, mocking, name-calling, eviscerating, marginalizing, threatening, intimidating, bullying, bombing, and war-making.
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POPSUsing Your Limited Power Effectively "In fact, it isn’t up to you to save this nation. It is up to us all. And you need to convince me, your friends, your family, your co-workers, etc. every single day that if we aren’t acting or paying attention, we are letting the powers that be hold their prized power over us for one more day."