Pax Moronica

I just read a piece in the online Wall Nut Journal onion pages by someone affiliated with the Hoover Asylum. And you're right, that's my own damn fault. But I'm not looking for sympathy, though it did hurt quite badly. I'm not even asking you to "read the whole thing," insofar as it is a lament for Obama's apparent abandonment of Bush's wildly successful Mideast diplomacy. (No, really, it is.)

I was just interested in this paragraph as a point of history:

In the ebb and flow of liberty, power always mattered, and liberty needed the protection of great powers. The appeal of the pamphlets of Mill and Locke and Paine relied on the guns of Pax Britannica, and on the might of America when British power gave way. In this vein, the assertive diplomacy of George W. Bush had given heart to Muslims long in the grip of tyrannies.

Indeed. Whenever British ships hove into view, natives all over the planet had the exact same response: "hooray, here comes the liberty." Just like now the universal response to the roar of American planes is, "oh look, they are dropping even more freedom, in the form of powerful explosives."