"I don't understand people who trash talk about America, who talk about us as being in decline, who act as though we are not yet the greatest country that has ever been created on the face of the earth for all of history." Hillary Clinton to the VFW 07/25/2016 (Hillary Clinton addresses military veterans at the Democratic National Convention Telegraph)
I thought I had blogged about this before. But I don't find it in a search.
So let's just say this is the kind of thing that American politicians should stop saying. Not only does it sound arrogant. It invites, maybe demands, really bad foreign policy decisions.
Ironically, this came as part of her not very impressive attempt to counter Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan with something along the lines of, hey, whaddya mean, America's already great, how could anyone thing everything's not just fine? ("I don't understand people who trash talk about America ...")
So while her words out-jingoed Trump's, she was still tone-deaf to how her Stronger Together campaign theme conveyed an attitude of complancy when she needed a convey a sense of urgency to the Democratic base and a sense of empathy to the millions of potential swing voters who weren't feeling that conditions weren't so great for them. The Clinton Era had its strong points. But it belongs to the past.
Also, if the United States really is the greatest imaginable country ever created in the entire history of every universe that might possibly exist in any dimension ... it would be a bit more seemly for American leaders and officials should let people from other countries be the ones to say it. Or from other universes or dimensions or whatever.
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