Take a Poll ! "They love us, they love us not, they love us..."

Get a grip here dudes! Take a study about where the disapproval ratings are highest and lowest in the world and crosstabulate the data to differentiate by level of education completed and whether that hatred is more directed at Americans or the policies of the government. You are lost in your own universe of trying to comprehend the rest of the world through the familiar cultural tools of US Marketing and Public Relations and electoral campaigns.

This is not a question of whether there really is hatred of America or Americans, or whether it is a 'problem' and whether we should strategize a PR campaign going forward to help the world understand us so that they will like and agree with us, or a differently focused campaign so they will not kill/attack American citizens but only representatives of our corporations overseas and diplomats. You are missing the point!

The point is to demand accountability from our leaders. Yes, it is about whether we hate ourselves for our sins of compromising our human values in overseas policies and our cognitive dissonance at being told over and in many complex ways that 'we have the best system' while we are all too aware it has become more than moderately corrupted and undemocratic and unaccountable to the real needs of ordinary citizens.

We don't need a poll to quantify how much people in the world love America and what America stands for. We need to stand the heck up for what it is we are supposed to stand for! Believe me, then the people of the world will respect us for our integrity and our committment to our own democracratic principles. Much more importantly, we can respect ourselves.

The argument here is going to be between those who say the glass is half full of the best system in the world versus those who say it is half full of undemocratic corruption. Bullplops! Doing the right thing by challenging authority and vested power is always necessary. It's a thankless discouraging job. It's always going to be so. Maybe those vested with authority are really making the right choices in a bad situation after all, but to really find out if this is so they still need to be challenged 24/7 to be accountable.