It's Haloscan's fault . . .

This would be a comment to this post over at Done with Mirrors, but haloscan didn't like the extreme linkaliciousness of my thoughts, so rather than changing all those links, I'll just turn those thoughts into a semi-coherent post. Read the post over there, read the comments already existing, and then you'll have an idea as to the context of this post:

I for one don't like the title to this post. I found Robert Graves, "Good-Bye to All That" nigh unreadable. I love his Cladius books, enjoyed most of White Goddess, but Good-bye to All That left me cold.

I know it's an important work by a great writer describing a harrowing personal experience during an important and tumultuous historical time. But the writing doesn't sing the way his other works do.

As far as the Iraq front in the War on Terror being damaging to our reputation abroad (Katie Couric will find my use of 'our' very annoying), the folks who are upset with us, were already predisposed to be upset with us, and were itching to find any excuse to return to hating America again after 9/11. The disdain for America's position as the globe's one and only "hyper-power" as some French chose to term it, was already strong in the 90s. Or maybe I imagined the whole thing. The world loved us unconditionally during the Clinton years, folks in that administration keep making that case over and over again. Janet Albrechtsen's opinion piece in The Australian earlier this year spells out things pretty well.

Pres. Bush has become the symbol for this sentiment, the Iraq War the excuse, but those feelings have existed in Europe (and to a lesser degree in East Asia) since we saved their bacon in WWII and protected them from Soviet agression.

As far as the far-left, anti-American (I'm sorry, not anti-American, pro-Global) slant of organizations like AHA, MLA, and ALA, they don't understand what damage they do to their organizations, and since they're openly hostile towards not only conservative principles, but even moderate thought, folks who aren't already predisposed to being 'true believers' who still want to get ahead in those groups figure out early on, either shut up, parrot the left-liberal party line, or find a new line of work that doesn't involve those organizations.