The reason, Ebbie, that I fear many Americans may tag Obama as a "wimp" is because he is inclined to talk things over calmly, rationally, and reasonably with other people rather than resorting to gross and manipulative negative emotional tactics and confrontation like most politicians do. He is inclined to seek common ground rather than engage in attack-dog tactics. Such people are often called "wimps" by those who have no patience or time for an intelligent approach to life.

I was defending him, in other words, but you seem to have missed it.

Amos - The British Empire is almost the perfect parallel to the present American Empire...only that the outer formalities have changed. You can't have official colonies any longer. It's not politically acceptable to do that now. So what you do now is you have unofficial colonies (client states that are apparently self-ruling in a political sense, but who do exactly what you want them to anyway). This is achieved mainly through financial pressure, but the Marines, Navy, and Air Force are there to use brute force to achieve it when brute force is required. The new American Empire basically took over FROM the British Empire when the Brits got effectively bankrupted by the two world wars and lost their overseas colonial empire. The new American Empire has supplanted the British, but the British are their very willing junior partner and helper now, riding on the American coattails, as it were, and thus still benefiting to a considerable extent.

It's as if England were the Greeks...once the great empire of their world...and then America (the Romans) came in to replace them, but there are very strong cultural ties between the two. The one is culturally speaking an extension of the other...with some clear differences, but with much in common as well.

Your denial of your nation's aggressive imperial role in the world is a denial that will not be found in populations outside of the USA, because they can see perfectly well the imperial course that America has been set on ever since the Spanish-American War, if not sooner than that, but it has greatly accelerated since the end of WWII.

It's blatantly obvious to populations in Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, everywhere. It's a fact of life.

And we all must live with it. Canadians live in the shadow of the Empire, and they know it. So does the whole rest of the world, but the Russians and Chinese have their own ambitious ideas about empire too. One day the Indians will as well. This could very well lead to a major war between competing empires at some point. I hope it doesn't, but it could. It always has in the past.

Note: I'm not talking about Glenn Beck so far simply because I'm finding other things to talk about here that interest me a lot more than Glenn Beck does.