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| Poll: Mexicans view U.S. political leaders negatively
Posted: 6/18/2008 8:33:29 AM | | It's funny....I've been living in Tijuana for nearly four years, and I've yet to meet a local who wants to go to the US. They think it's boring and lacking in passion, and they are fiercely proud of being Mexican. The ones crossing the border must be coming from farther south. Most, from the USA, probably think that every Mexican wants to migrate across the border. This simply is not true. | |
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| Poll: Mexicans view U.S. political leaders negatively
Posted: 6/18/2008 2:22:12 PM | "i was around then, well informed, clinton started the ball rolling on nafta. maybe it was finally ratified under bush 1."
That is absolutely laughable, especially the part that says "well informed."
I quoted the information about the genesis of NAFTA, which clearly states that the negotiations started under George H. Bush, the father of the current president, who also signed the agreement. The treaty was later ratified by the legislature, and Bill Clinton signed it, but the deal was made before Clinton got into the presidency.
Next time, please take the time to verify your information so that you don't embarras yourself so badly. Just being around doesn't mean that one is well informed. I have been around since the 1970s and I remember seeing a lot migrant workers doing the agricultural labor, picking fruits and vegetables. Funny thing, most of them weren't legally here, and I never saw high school kids working alongside the migrants. | |
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| Poll: Mexicans view U.S. political leaders negatively
Posted: 6/23/2008 7:18:09 AM | http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121417762529095457.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
Anti-Americanism Is Mostly Hype
By FOUAD AJAMI
June 23, 2008; Page A17
So America is unloved in Istanbul and Cairo and Karachi: It is an annual ritual, the June release of the Pew global attitudes survey and the laments over the erosion of America's standing in foreign lands
We were once loved in Anatolia, but now a mere 12% of Turks have a "favorable view" of the U.S. Only 22% of Egyptians think well of us. Pakistan is crucial to the war on terror, but we can only count on the goodwill of 19% of Pakistanis.
American liberalism is heavily invested in this narrative of U.S. isolation. The Shiites have their annual ritual of 10 days of self-flagellation and penance, but this liberal narrative is ceaseless: The world once loved us, and all Parisians were Americans after 9/11, but thanks to President Bush we have squandered that sympathy.
It is an old trick, the use of foreign narrators and witnesses to speak of one's home. Montesquieu gave the genre its timeless rendition in his Persian Letters, published in 1721. No one was fooled, these were Parisian letters, and the Persian travelers, Rica and Usbek, mere stand-ins for an author taking stock of his homeland after the death of Louis XIV and the coming of an age of enlightenment and skepticism.
"This King is a great magician. He exerts authority even over the minds of his subjects; he makes them think what he wants," Rica writes from Paris. "You must not be amazed at what I tell you about this prince: there is another magician, stronger than he. This magician is called the Pope. He will make the King believe that three are only one, or else that the bread one eats is not bread, or that the wine one drinks is not wine, and a thousand other things of the same kind." Handy witnesses, these Persians.
The Pew survey tells us that some foreign precincts show a landslide victory for Barack Obama. France leads the pack; fully 84% of those following the American campaign are confident Mr. Obama will do the right thing in foreign policy, compared with 33% who say that about John McCain. There are similar results in Germany, and a closer margin in Britain. The populations of Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan have scant if any confidence in either candidate.
The deference of American liberal opinion to the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Amman and Karachi is nothing less than astounding. You would not know from these surveys, of course, that anti-Americanism runs deep in the French intellectual scene, and that French thought about the great power across the Atlantic has long been a jumble of envy and condescension. In the fabled years of the Clinton presidency, long before Guantanamo, the torture narrative and the war in Iraq, American pension funds were, in the French telling, raiding their assets, bringing to their homeland dreaded Anglo-Saxon economics, and the merciless winds of mondialisation (globalization).
I grew up in the Arab world in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and anti-Americanism was the standard political language – even for those pining for American visas and green cards. Precious few took this seriously. The attraction to the glamorous, distant society was too strong in the Beirut of my boyhood.
It is no different today in Egypt or Pakistan. And what people tell pollsters who turn up in their midst with their clipboards? In Hosni Mubarak's tyranny, anti-Americanism is the permissible safety valve for Egyptians unable to speak of their despot. We stand between Pharaoh and his frustrated people, and the Egyptians railing against America are giving voice to the disappointment that runs through their life and culture. Scapegoating and anti-Americanism are a substitute for a sober assessment of what ails that old, burdened country.
Nor should we listen too closely to the anti-American hysteria that now grips Turkey. That country was once a serious, earnest land. It knew its place in the world as a bridge between Europe and Islam. But of late it has become the "torn country" that the celebrated political scientist Samuel Huntington said it was, its very identity fought over between the old Kemalist elites and the new Islamists.
No Turkish malady is caused by America, and no cure can come courtesy of the Americans. The Turks giving vent to anti-Americanism are doing a parody of Europe: They were led to believe that the Europe spurning them, and turning down their membership in its club, is given to anti-Americanism, so they took to the same fad. Turkish anti-Americanism is no doubt fueled by the resentment within Turkey of the American war in Iraq that gave protection and liberty to the Kurds. No apology is owed the Turks; indeed, it is they who must reconsider their intolerance of minorities. If the Turks were comfortable with the abnormality of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, it is they who have a problem.
And if there is enthusiasm for Barack Obama on foreign shores, his rise to fame and power must be a tribute to the land that has made this possible. Where else would a boy of marginality and relative poverty find his way to the peak of political life? Certainly not in his father's Kenya, where the tribal origins of the Obamas would have determined young Barack's life-chances. In an Arab world hemmed in by pedigree, where rulers bequeath power to their sons and the lot of the sons is invariably that of the fathers, the tale of Obama is fantasy.
There are lines, and barriers, of race which bedevil Arab lands, and they will be there awaiting a President Obama should he prevail in November. Consider a recent speech by Libya's erratic ruler, Moammar Gadhafi, to his countrymen.
He said he feared that Mr. Obama, as a "black man," might succumb to an "inferiority complex" if he were to come to power. "This is a great menace because Obama might turn out to be more white than the whites, exaggerating his persecution and disdain of blacks. The statements of our Kenyan brother with an American nationality about Jerusalem, and his support for Israelis, and his slighting of the Palestinian people is either a measure of his ignorance of international politics or a lie perpetrated on the Jews in the course of an election campaign."
There is no need to roam distant lands in search of indictments of America's ways. Tales of our demise appear every day in our media. Yes, it is not perfect, this republic of ours. But the possibilities for emancipation and self-improvement it affords are unmatched in other lands.
Meanwhile, a maligned American president now returns from a Europe at peace with American leadership. In France, Germany and Italy, center-right governments are eager to proclaim their identification with American power. Jacques Chirac is gone. Now there is Nicolas Sarkozy, who offered a poetic tribute last November to the American soldiers who fell on French soil, before a joint session of the U.S. Congress. "The children of my generation," he said, "understood that those young Americans, 20 years old, were true heroes to whom they owed the fact that they were free people and not slaves. France will never forget the sacrifice of your children."
The great battle over the Iraq war has subsided, and Europeans who ponder the burning grounds of the Islamic world know the distinction between fashionable anti-Americanism and the international order underpinned by American power. George W. Bush may have been indifferent to political protocol, but he held the line when it truly mattered, and the Europeans have come to understand that appeasement of dictators and brigands begets its own troubles.
It is one thing to rail against the Pax Americana. But after the pollsters are gone, the truth of our contemporary order of states endures. We live in a world held by American power – and benevolence. Nothing prettier, or more just, looms over the horizon. | |
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| Poll: Mexicans view U.S. political leaders negatively
Posted: 6/23/2008 3:57:19 PM | What the heck has the last post have to do with the thread topic?
There is not one mention of Mexico, or attitudes of Mexicans, or the attitudes of Americans towards Mexicans, illegal immigration, etc.
It gets kind of boring to have to read a long post that doesn't contribute to the discussion of the topic. | |
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| Poll: Mexicans view U.S. political leaders negatively
Posted: 11/4/2008 2:37:21 PM | Ignorance runs deep. Without getting to political. Let me give you my take on all of this. First off, a lot of people dont like this administration, the Bush administration has been disaster of historical propostions. Americans both republicans and democrats do not like the course that our county is leading. Bush has divided American, Republicans, have divided america because their view is you are either with us or against us... If your not with the bush administration they you are not patriotic...this is the kind of bullshit that we have been feed for two terms. Look around, the economy, two wars, division, human rights abuses at Guantanamo, corruption, the effects should be an indicator that the last 8 yrs our leaders have deceived us! Yes do so research and find out....
As for our neighbor to the south, Mexico, Mexico is an ally of the United states. The moment we start treating our neighbors like an enemy is the moment we are turning into a backwards nation. Illegal immigration is for economic reasons only! People need a job they come to the source. We should take step to curve illegal immigration and promote legal immigration and turism and imports and exports that is how countries mutually benefit. Tell me how you would feel if your neighbor suddenly built a wall around your side of the property, then stated to point a gun towards your house and everytime you left your home he would act suspecious of you or accuse you of being a terrorist because you look like the neighbor down the street who broke into his home. Come on America, dont be so stupid, how did you get here how did your parents get here, the ones that really got stiffed are the Native American people. We extermindated them!
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