PARIS -- Once upon a time in the 1980s, when I was reporting from Europe, there was an overrated superpower known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The nightly television news from the capital of the USSR, Moscow, routinely opened with an official in a badly made suit handing flowers to a worker who had exceeded his or her production quota of cabbage or wing nuts.
Then came several stories that I called "The West in Flames" or, many nights, "The United States in Flames." The film, lifted from Western broadcasts, was all fire, flood and plague in democratic, capitalist countries. Believing Russians, the few, must have gone to bed thinking they would wake up to unconditional Western surrender in the Cold War. The opposite happened, of course.
But the news in Europe, West and East, is still showing America in flames, flood, etc. Cities are shown underwater; befuddled American officials are shown trying to explain why we are actually winning the war on terrorism, the war for a free Iraq and a modern Afghanistan. They also try to ignore or explain the torture of Muslim prisoners in concentration camps, indicted members of Congress and reporters thrown in jail.
Unconvincingly, I'm afraid. The president of the United States is uniformly projected as a fool, anti-freedom, anti-science, anti-common sense. Sometimes unwitting, sometimes witting.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucrr/20051024/cm_ucrr/theendofsuperpower
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