The Democrats have done and said lots of things to annoy me over the years, but one of the most egregious was the assertion that our invasion of Iraq had isolated us and made us hated in the world.

As usual, they remove the salient context for their own political ends, which is, "hated by whom?"

It is good to be hated by some people. Would you really have wanted to good will of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia?

My parents were children during the second world war, but they remember the occupation of Germany and Austria, and I always found their pro-American attitudes somewhat counterintuitive--rather amazing really. I never heard even a lick of resentment and in fact, it was clear that they both considered the U.S. (with Canada and Australia) as "the promised land", with all the expectations and virtues associated with that biblical concept.

Part of it was economic, particularly in light of the post-war devastation, but the major attraction was the possibility of living in a "free country". My parents never really articulated what this meant, but over the years it became clear that what it meant to them was an opportunity to live in a country where the idea of freedom is sacred. Where the idea of freedom is so powerful that a country will go to war and sacrifice lives for the freedom of other people.

Other countries have good relations, but the U.S.A. elicits actual love.

That's easily seen from Bush's visit to former East bloc countries. Its not that they love Bush so much, but what he represents--the U.S.A. Freedom.

The reason is simple--while liberal pinheads like Dan Rather pontificate about speaking truth to power, the fine men and women of the U.S. military do it with their life's blood. Only two kinds of people are going to love the U.S. for the right reasons--the people who owe their freedom to it, and those who value freedom as much as we do. The powerful and those with a stake in the status quo, no matter how objectionable--the Jacques Chiracs and Gerhard Schröders of the world, are not going to be friendly to the U.S. when its busy speaking truth to power.

The roots of Americas machinery of freedom are explored in a new book by Michael Know Beran and excerpted in City Journal: Forge of Empires 1861–1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made

In 1861, free institutions seemed poised to carry all before them. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II emancipated 22 million serfs. In Germany, lawmakers dedicated to free constitutional principles prepared to assert civilian control over Prussia’s feudal military caste. In America, Abraham Lincoln entered the White House pledged to a revolutionary policy of excluding human bondage from the nation’s territories.

The new machinery of freedom, though Anglo-American in design, was universal in scope. At its core was the idea, as yet imperfectly realized, that all human beings possess a fundamental dignity. This was a truth that, Abraham Lincoln believed, was “applicable to all men and all times.” In 1861, the faith that all men have a right to life, liberty, and the fruits of their industry was invoked as readily on the Rhine and the Neva as on the Potomac and the Thames.

But in the decade that followed, a reaction gathered momentum. Around the world, privilege rose up to defend its prerogatives. In Russia, in Germany, and in America, grandees with their backs against the wall met the challenge of liberty with a new philosophy of coercion.

It was founded on two ideas. The first: paternalism. Landowners in Russia and in the American South argued that their domestic institutions embodied the paternal principle: the bondsman had, in his master, a compassionate father to look after him, and thus was better off than the worker in the cruel world of free labor. In Germany, Prussian aristocrats sought to implement a paternal code designed to make the masses more subservient to the state. The paternalists, Lord Macaulay wrote disapprovingly, wanted to “regulate the school, overlook the playground, fix the hours of labour and recreation, prescribe what ballads shall be sung, what tunes shall be played, what books shall be read, what physic shall be swallowed.”

The second idea was militant nationalism—the right of certain (superior) peoples to impose their wills on other (inferior) peoples. Planters in the American South dreamed of enslaving Central America and the Caribbean. Germany’s nationalists aspired to incorporate Danish, French, and Polish provinces into a new German Reich. In Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Panslav nationalists sought to rout the Ottoman Turks and impose Russia’s will on Byzantium.

The opposition of Democrats to the war in Iraq, and particularly the offensive rhetoric that deemed liberation immoral, simply demonstrates who the institutional opponents of the soul of America really are. Perhaps nothing emphasized that cynicism better than John Kerry's remarks about the Vietnam war.

Let me just say to the first part of your question with respect to Boat People and killing... everybody predicted a massive bloodbath in Vietnam. There was not a massive bloodbath in Vietman. There were reeducation camps, and they weren’t [garbled]. Nobody likes that kind of outcome, but I’ve met a lot of people today who were in those education camps who are thriving in the Vietnam of today.

Kerry's casual description of life under a repressive communist regime as "thriving" is chilling, and only underscores the cynicism of the Democrat establishment. No doubt blacks are also "thriving" under a regime of entitlement slavery and paternalist affirmative action.