"The financial meltdown and the failure of the US govt's warmongering foreign policy, appears to have been a wake up call to 'Joe Public' who is beginning to question the wisdom of the 'liberalist', ''\rights for all at any cost' mentality." —Ake.

Ake, what planet are you on? The financial meltdown was caused primarily by the diluting and general gutting of a number of regulatory agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is supposed to oversee and prevent the kind of wild-ass speculation and balloon-building that led to it. This kind of deregulation has been the goal of the conservatives since FDR, a liberal, first instituted them (lack of regulation also being the primary cause of the Depression of the 1930s).

The U. S. government's war mongering foreign policy, especially within the last couple of decades, has also been do to the policies of the conservatives. It was the Bush administration, led by the policies of the Neo-Conservatives, that precipitated the current wars in Iraq (which had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attack) and Afghanistan, supposedly in answer to such attacks. Full-blown military campaigns against loosely-knit terrorist groups have always failed, being like trying to get rid of a plague of wasps by hitting their nest with a baseball bat.

One can go through point-by-point and show explicitly why the current state of the country—and much of the world—can be directly laid at the doorstep of the Republicans and their conservative policies, beginning with the Reagan administration and culminating with George W. Bush, the hand-puppet, and the cabal of puppet-masters who ran him.

Barack Obama inherited a real mess, and most of the criticism of him has to do with the fact that a couple of decades of racing headlong toward the Dark Ages takes a bit of time to reverse. He has a lot of messes, left by the previous administration, to clean up

Those who talk a lot about what a marvelous "City of the Hill" and glorious example the United States is, talk a very pretty sounding game, but the truth is that the U. S. has a lot of house cleaning to do, along with redirecting both our domestic policy and foreign policy before the U. S. can be any kind of example to the rest of the world.

Don Firth