america’s shameYou know, if you don't read Glenn Greenwald every day, you should. Today, my homeboy G2 points us to the latest Worldwide Pew Research Poll, which indicates that America's standing in the world has sunk to its lowest level in recorded history.

Right Wing "thinkers" like Hugh Hewitt would have you believe that the Damn Foreigners hate us "for our freedoms", which, I guess, are somehow inherently different and more ideologically pure than the measurably greater freedoms you or I would have living in Amsterdam or Oslo. As Greenwald points out, however, there is another, equally erroneous strain of thought that suggests that the United States is hated now and always has been because of our traditional role as hard-hearted capitalist bully of the global playground.

The Pew Poll puts the lie to both of these assertions. It's true that "they" (i.e., Everybody in the World) all hate us now, yes, but this newly widespread, virulent anti-Americanism has come about as a direct result of the policies of the Bush Administration:

The new comprehensive worldwide Pew poll of public opinion conclusively disproves both of those views. The polling data demonstrates that while America's standing in the world is dangerously low on every continent in the world (the sole exception being Christian nations in Africa), pervasive anti-American sentiment has emerged only in the last six years. Prior to the Bush administration, America was respected and admired in most of the world, its values a source of inspiration, the ideals it espoused a source of widespread respect. Those are just facts.

The collapse of America's moral standing in the world -- the intense and widespread contempt in which we are held -- is, without question, a direct by-product of our behavior over the last six years. While America, like every country, has made mistakes and engaged in wrongful behavior prior to that, it was viewed by an overwhelming majority of people in the world as a net force for good. Far from the claim by neoconservatives and their allies that the "international community" is intrinsically anti-American no matter what we do -- and we should therefore ignore it and express our contempt for it -- the widespread respect America commanded and the admiration for our values was, prior to George W. Bush, a vital ingredient of our national security and ability to protect our interests.

In my own travels abroad, the attitude I always encountered was that while occasionally the US would elevate a truly despicable leader like Ronald Reagan or Bush the First to power, people made a distinction between "America" and Americans. That distinction is fading away. Increasingly the attitude I get from friends in other countries and readers outside the US is, "If you guys hate George Bush so much, why aren't you doing anything about him? He flouts your laws, he has ordered the invasion of a nation who never attacked you, he has subverted human rights and dignity around the globe. Why aren't you rioting in the streets? Where is your famous American bravery now?"

I don't have a good answer for that. I thought we were accomplishing something when we helped to elect a Democratic majority in 2006, but that pipe dream has evaporated in the last six months. The fact remains that while our military has gone to war, America has gone to the mall. We don't express our dismay by way of civil disobedience because we don't want to go to jail or lose our jobs. Does that make us cowards or just lazy? At this point, how much are we like the German citizens during World War Two who pretended that those "factories" at the edge of town were just making soap?

The day after 9/11, the French newspaper Le Monde published a headline that said, "We Are All Americans Now".

In this tragic moment, when words seem so inadequate to express the shock people feel, the first thing that comes to mind is this: We are all Americans! We are all New Yorkers, just as surely as John F. Kennedy declared himself to be a Berliner in 1962 when he visited Berlin. Indeed, just as in the gravest moments of our own history, how can we not feel profound solidarity with those people, that country, the United States, to whom we are so close and to whom we owe our freedom, and therefore our solidarity? How can we not be struck at the same time by this observation: The new century has come a long way.

Six years later, that has become this:

The picture that emerges here is conclusively clear. In virtually every area of the world -- Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia -- overwhelming majorities of people viewed the U.S. favorably prior to the Bush presidency. But in virtually every single country in each of those regions, the percentage which now views the U.S. favorably has collapsed, and is now confined only to minorities, often tiny minorities. The precipitous drop in U.S. credibility -- from levels of great respect to levels of widespread contempt -- is as stark among America's traditional allies as it is in less friendly regions. Contrary to claims found among both America's right and some on Europe's left, the U.S. enjoyed great moral credibility among its Western European allies prior to the Bush presidency:

Whatever good will may have been there in the wake of one of the worst moments in American history has vanished into the mists like Brigadoon. Why?

Our standing in the world has changed profoundly over the last six years -- it has collapsed almost completely -- for only one reason: because we have fundamentally changed how we conduct ourselves, the principles that guide us, the values we embody. The world was not "anti-American" before the Bush presidency, but -- at least in terms of how the world perceives our country -- it is now. That is one of the key aspects of the Bush legacy that is "tragic."

Plainly, America's standing in the world can be changed again, the collapse reversed, our credibility restored. But that can happen only if we repudiate the radicalism and brutality and complete disregard for civilized norms that have defined us at our core since the 9/11 attacks. This comprehensive Pew poll provides the definitive refutation for those who claim that the U.S. has been hated for decades, as well as for those who claim that the U.S. will be hated no matter what it does.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the Dear Leader's Great War on Terror have doused America's greatness in gasoline and set it ablaze. Everything that we were taught to value about this country is null and void under BushCo. We're not all equal under the law. We're no longer a world leader in human rights. We unapologetically abduct, secretly imprison, and gleefully torture citizens of other sovereign nations.

Wake up, America. They don't hate us for our freedoms.

They hate us because, as a nation, we're acting like assholes.

Until we as Americans rise up to smite the Right Wing Hate Industry and its various political and media appendages as the cancer on the body politic that they are (to borrow a phrase from Digby), we are all culpable. We are all guilty.

To allow this administration to complacently sit in office while we wait for the clock to run out is an act of moral cowardice. It tells the world (and future generations of Americans) that we as a nation don't care about the laws, human rights, or anything else that interferes with our immediate comfort.

The America that the world sees now is not the America that my parents raised me to believe in, not the America that my father and both my grandfathers fought for in Vietnam, Korea, and World War Two. But until we have ousted this criminal administration, that is the America that we are.