Or how the (low quality)media can affect your point of View on things...:D

The opening link being a good example, the Telegraph used to be a relatively good paper, now its run by two alledged crooks and staffed by Daily Fail castoffs.

You have illusions about the state of things in your country. As we see it, corruption is AT LEAST as great in the US as it is here. Most of the lobbyists influencing decision makers in Brussel (insiders say there are 40-60 lobbyists per member of EU parliament), are representing American companies or US state offices. You are a very German, ironically: you represent quite strongly what usually is associated with the Germans: that the Germans are obedient believer of the official order and believe in the authenticity and legality of authorities and that things in reality of the state function like it is laid out black on white on paper. As I said before over the years: you mistake America as it is with what by the intentions 200 years ago it was meant to be. You refuse to realised the wide gap between the intention and the status-as-is. But the latter is what America really defines.

Not what we want to be, but what we really do is what defines who we are. The ideals expressed in old historical documents, and the contemporary present state - the latter is an insult to the first.

Has the military drilled you to be so uncritical towards your political leaders and establishment, so that you so notoriously mistake intention of the ideal with status in reality? I think so. Or is that a characteristic trait of yours that has drawn you to the military in the first? I have see your attitude towards your nation so very very often in professional soldiers, a certain kind of blind faith in one's country and leaders, uncritical and unreflective, no matter from which country. Germans, British, Americans, it does not matter. But I would hope and expect this to ease of a bit when one becomes older and has seen some nasty things. But well, everybody wants to believe he is on the side of what is good and what is the light, so maybe that is just a human basic attitude and to varying degrees can be found in everybody. If you want to sell war and soldiering to people, you have to be especially convincing in this regard, due to the matter war deals with.

"Nur die treuesten Soldaten schützen den Genossen Generalsekretär!" was an answer by a former GDR-security officer to a question in an interview. The Swiss guard is recruited from uncritical devout believers only.

Anyhow, this came in today: Es macht keinen Spaß mehr, Anti-Amerikaner zu sein. :D

Funny that even me thinks since two or three years that Obama-policy indeed is pure socialism.

Why is this so. Maybe because if both Europeans and Americans get lured by their corrupted establishments to move away from the democratic and free and liberal basic orders their states are founded upon, this is motivated by the same intentions of the establishments to accumulate even more corrupted power and deceive the masses over that. Same intention causes same design, and so both America and Europe become more and more equal in the way they are being distorted.

What comes it down to by the end of the day? When the democrats win an election and send a president, the corporations in the background stay in control and power. And when the Republicans win elections and send a president, the corporations in the background stay in control and power. Politicians come and go, the system stays. And that is not the system your constitution has idealistically "designed", but is an empty corpus that has been eroded and replaced with a different system that many people are not aware of, or prefer to ignore, and that has been designed by those in the background to serve their purpose and to safeguard them against the people. On how the US was meant, you must not argue with me, I have too much sympathy for that and agree with too much of that, and in the past 3 or 4 years have even moved more towards it. But in our amounts to which we see the difference between the idea, and the realised present status, we could not be more apart.

Please dont use Skybird as the standard for Europeans.
And his rants really only represent a small portion of the people here.

I thought so. I have a bucket full of German relatives and none of them are anything like Skybird but you can't judge an entire people based on what your cousins are like.

True dat True dat. :)

and as with the media, it is with the people.
you have the lefties and the righties, the ones and the others, the same and the different.
Truth lies somewhere in the middle.