Symptoms of Religious Rhetoric and Wacko Extremism

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It is no fluke that the US influence and popularity is dropping like a rock. In a previous post years ago, cited was a consortium of lifetime American diplomats and generals, from both political parties - people who had worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations even back to Richard Nixon - noted how George Jr has undermined all their work of the past 40 years.

Of course, like the George Jr tax cut, destructive after effects appear years later. Now we have another example of how religious zeal is undermining American economic dominance. From the International Hearld Tribune:

EU Tries to Unblock Internet Impasse
The United States and Europe clashed here Thursday in one of their sharpest public disagreements in months, after European Union negotiators proposed stripping the Americans of their effective control of the Internet.

The European decision to back the rest of the world in demanding the creation of a new international body to govern the Internet clearly caught the Americans off balance and left them largely isolated at talks designed to come up with a new way of regulating the digital traffic of the 21st century.
...
The United States lost its only ally late Wednesday when the EU made a surprise proposal to create an intergovernmental body that would set principles for running the Internet. Currently, the U.S. Commerce Department approves changes to the Internet's "root zone files," which are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, a nonprofit organization based in Marina del Rey, California.

Political unease with the U.S. approach, symbolized by opposition to the war in Iraq, has spilled over into these technical discussions, delegates said. The EU and developing nations, they added, wanted to send a signal to America that it could not run things alone. Opposition to Washington's continued dominance of the Internet was illustrated by a statement released last week by the Brazilian delegation to the talks. "On Internet governance, three words tend to come to mind: lack of legitimacy. In our digital world, only one nation decides for all of us."

Can you really blame the world? When wacko logic posted by Urbane Guerilla types is the policy of the George Jr administration, then the world (and the American science community) has so much to fear from American control.

Once America was highly regarded by over 70% of the world - when its leader even knew what countries bordered Israel. It does not take a genius to even see Geroge Jr lying about Iraq, stem cells, weapons of mass destruction, intelligent design, extremist rhetoric about birth control, killing so many world treaties to keep the world safe (anti-ballistic missile treaty, nuclear test ban treaty, fundamental declaration of human rights, Oslo Accords, etc), America's pathetic response to an Indian Ocean Tsunami, and America's miserly response to foreign aid (only extremists believe the US is a generous nation - a fact that the numbers do not support and demonstrated by the US response to Millennium Development Goals).

As long as extremist Americans would pervert American principles by imposing religious beliefs on all people and rewriting history for to their own political agendas, then the world has much to fear from the US government. No wonder American extremists fear the UN.

And so we have but another example of how the world is turning against the US.