Having a pack of foolish, America-hating Fascists at the helm of state carries consequences. We’ve seen the price America has paid so far: a savagely divided nation, in which reason, science and enlightenment has been banished to the storms while superstition and mythology takes a comfortable seat right by the fireplace. A broken Army, with well over 2,000 dead, and tens of thousands wounded, mutilated, crippled and abandoned. An economy in tatters, teetering on the edge financial oblivion as more and more of our debt is owned by a Communist government.

A fractured Democracy, plagued by endemic corruption and cronyism, the gears of government re-tuned to personal greed and destruction of the environment. An electoral system that, at best, provides questionable voting results. A compromised or bought out press that winks at the fraudulent results, and makes specious excuses for voting exit polls that blatantly disagree with the results produced by suspect voting machinery. This same press would rather cover a candidate’s suit color than what his proposals and policies are, because they are more logical than those of the hand that holds the presstitutes leash.

World-wide revulsion at the imperialistic demands of the cabal at the seat of government has created yet another anti-American backlash, and this one is apparently being viewed more seriously. Someone has created a consortium of American businesses to make America look better to the rest of the world.

"Sooner or later, anti-Americanism is bad for business," said Keith Reinhard, chairman of the New York advertising firm DDB Worldwide. Reinhard also is the founder and president of Business for Diplomatic Action, which is organizing U.S. companies in a private-sector initiative to improve America's image in the world.

Not all American firms are convinced that Americas’s bad reputation will hurt their profits, because they haven’t yet seen the bottoming out.

But "we know that in the minds of many people outside the United States, American brands are linked to American policy. In marketing, we know that attitude precedes behavior," he said.

Mr Reinhard cited several surveys, interviews and other evidence showing sharp increases in negative attitudes toward the United States in recent years. American ideals such as democracy and economic freedom are still admired in most of the world, but foreigners increasingly also see the United States and its citizens as "arrogant, insensitive, ignorant and loud," said Reinhard, who suggested that Americans could use more humility in their dealings abroad.

[ed: The recent “listening tour” of Karen Hughes, the new Under Secretary of State for Public Dimploacy, throughout the Middle east probably qualifies as an example.]

Mr Reinhard feels that Much of the resentment is directed at U.S. foreign policy, but there is also a growing belief that American culture is too pervasive and corrupting, and that the global expansion of U.S. companies has been exploitative, he said. He said U.S. business "stands to lose its historic competitive edge" if the best and brightest workers in other countries are more reluctant to work for American companies.

Cari L. Eggspuehler, executive director of Business for Diplomatic Action and a former State Department official spoke at the conference. "I am hoping the private sector will step up, because only the private sector can deal with this," she told conference attendees. "The federal government does not have credibility around the world as a spokesperson for us."

[ed: Words fail me. The feds have no credibility overseas, and so our State Department must now be privatized.]

State Department official Robert A. Tappan also called on businesses at the conference to help battle negative perceptions. In response to a question about whether the United States is trying to impose its culture and type of government on other countries, Tappan said that is not the administration's goal.

"Despite what you may read in newspapers and see on television, it is not the aspiration of the United States to spread American democracy abroad -- it is democracy," Tappan said. "It is not American democracy in Iraq; it is Iraqi democracy."

Democracy. Whiskey. Women. Sexy.