“This is a tempest in a teapot,” Cannon said. “This is not snubbing anybody; this is nothing that is detrimental to Canada-U.S. relations. Our relations are the best relations in the world.”
- Clinton criticism 'tempest in a teapot,' Cannon says, CTV.ca, April 10, 2010.
2. When Barack Obama visited France last year a British reporter asked the president whether he believed in American exceptionalism. Mr Obama said he did—“just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” You may think that an agreeably tactful answer. And yet some conservatives have turned it into a profane text, one that proves Mr Obama’s unfitness for the great office he holds. More than a year after the event they are still banging on about it. In the Washington Post last week Charles Krauthammer wrote the latest of a stream of articles about the Perfidious Reply. With these words, say his detractors, Mr Obama showed his true colours as a man who does not believe genuinely in America’s greatness and is secretly reconciled to its eventual decline.
What is going on? The simplest explanation for this tempest in a teapot is that Mr Obama’s critics will seize on any perceived error. But it may be that those critics need to hear constant reaffirmations of American greatness because of the doubt planted in their own hearts by the country’s present travails.
This would not be the first time American intellectuals have been troubled by the sense of greatness slipping away. Previous episodes have not always coincided with hardship at home or testing foreign wars. Times of ease and plenty can bring on the same longing. In the 1950s, that golden age, Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote “The Decline of Greatness”, lamenting the departure of great men and the nation’s descent into bland conformity.
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