Sourpuss Brit Claims US Full of "Hollow Boastfulness"

Edward Luce of the FT shows what the word "unhinged" really means. He goes back to de Tocqueville to demonstrate America's hubristic side, and gives Lincoln's Gettysburg Address faint praise. Read it and see what happens when a guy who normally is an abject tout for Obama turns on him. Probably a couple gin on the rocks too many & a bad day for his stock account.

From the nation’s birth, America’s leaders have detected the hand of providence in its journey. But since the attacks of September 11 2001, oratorical jingoism has become blunter and more widespread. Alexis de Tocqueville said that Americans lived in “the perpetual utterance of self-applause”. To one degree or another most nations now share that impulse. But America has entered a new season of hollow boastfulness.
From Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address that produced “government of the people, by the people, for the people” to Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural address in 1932 when Americans had “nothing to fear but fear itself”, America’s leaders used to beat their chests more sparingly. Lincoln once said America was the “last best hope of earth”. He did not chant it like a mantra. John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration (“ask what you can do for your country”) was exhortatory rather than self-congratulatory. Today’s superlatives put even Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” in the shade.

Read it and see why this puffed-up little man, who would be doing his column in German, [or Russian] if the US hadn't been so self-confident, is shot down by letters to FT in the comment section.