As Hu Jintao wings his way home, America's hectoring still ringing in his ears, he must be thinking that maybe we Americans should stop lecturing them and take a closer look at ourselves.
... And what are the Chinese doing in their ascendancy to first power on earth that we did not do in ours?
Hu Jintao got an earful from us on his human rights records. Stop the repression of Uighurs and
Tibetans. Stop jailing political dissidents. Allow more freedom of the Internet and the press.
But on his way home, Hu must be thinking to himself: Who are these Americans to lecture us?
Is this not the same tribe that enslaved black people for 250 years and segregated them for a century? Is this not the same tribe that
drove the Indians off their lands, then stuck them all in Bantustans called reservations? Are these not the only people in history to have dropped atomic bombs on defenseless cities?
How would we have reacted if Hu, instead of pretending he couldn't hear the translation of that question about human rights, retorted,
"We Chinese are also concerned about what we read of human rights at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, of renditions, torture and something called 'water-boarding.'"
...
But as America sinks economically and retreats strategically, while China grows at 10 percent and bristles with confidence, we appear to be a nation of whiners. They are eating our lunch, and we sound like losers in a locker room.
We can't win or end our wars, balance our budgets or control our borders. Great states like
California and Illinois appear about to go belly-up. The U.S. government is running a third straight deficit of near 10 percent of our entire economy. We used our
stimulus money to save government jobs. They used theirs for bullet trains.
Time to see ourselves as others see us.