The theme of American exceptionalism has characterized America since the time of John Winthrop and his "city upon a hill." This sense that Americans play a unique role in history is something any enemy contemplating an attack on America ought to take into account before killing 3,000 of us on a peaceful autumn day or 2,390 of us on a December day in 1941 while the nation was at peace.
On my flight back from Chicago, I was reading Conrad Black's absorbing biography, "Franklin Delano Roosevelt," which has just been released. In his chronicle of the American entry into World War II, I read with special attentiveness the low opinion in which the American people were held by our enemies, the fascists, Nazis and the Japanese militarists. Particularly bracing were the late Herr Hitler's insane diatribes against FDR, some being quite reminiscent of slurs now cast President Bush's way. True, Bush has yet to be called a Jew, but as with FDR in the 1940s GWB is now being described by the lunatics as a tool of the Jews.
Walking the streets of vigorous Chicago a few days ago, watching so many Americans engaged in the gamut of constructive activities from commerce to socializing to prayer, I could not help but reflect on how wrong the naysayers and the utopians have been. Reflecting, too, on the vitriol an earlier president endured from tyrants for defending freedom despite heavy costs, I was reminded that the brutes often sound the same.
The case they make against American vigilance usually balances on a nonsense. Domestic critics hoping to win favor and perhaps even the presidency might note the futility of the 1960s prophets and the political dead-end of the 1930s isolationists. Socially, economically and in foreign policy, America's present course is sound.