[russotto]

Originally Posted by Catwoman

But this grandiose image is tarnished with a history of corruption, pollution and death. Indeed, industrial America's very foundation is war; a nasty, brutal civil war that killed far too many. Like all wars.

America's very foundation is war, a nasty, brutal war known as the American Revolution. But Europe can hardly reasonably hold that against us without forgetting its own history.

Media 'reportage', from Fox to Friends to Films, is often self-appreciative, righteous, moralistic and - for want of a better word - intolerably slick.

You do know that "Friends" is fiction, a situation comedy, right?

'Price wars' is an American concept.

A price war is when competitors engage in a competition for customers by lowering prices. This is a problem?

It has paved the way for Third World Debt, Free Trade Zones, and unqualified poverty.

Ahh, yes, the "America is responsible for all the troubles of the world" theory. As for Free Trade Zones, seems to me the largest one is in Europe.

American tourists are idiotic, presumptious, arrogant and largely unwilling to involve themselves in local culture.

Eh? They're tourists. On vacation for a week or two, maybe a month at the outside, how are they to "involve themselves in the local culture"? As for the rest, much of that is sampling bias; the assholes tend to be noticed. Not that there's any shortage of obnoxious Americans, granted.

I apologise for the lack of euphemism but American foreign policy is trigger-happy, always has been.

Which is why the British needed to forge a telegram to get the US into WWI, which is why the US didn't enter WWII until attacked, which is why the US made no moves against the Taliban until attacked by their associates, etc. Oh, sure, you can find times (putting Iraq aside for the moment) where the US has acted in a trigger-happy manner (Grenada, the Spanish-American War, Vietnam -- though note in the last two cases a provocation was invented to get the American public's support), but what you call lack of euphemism is rather ridiculous overstatement.