earlier posted this in another forum but it really fits this story well.
Sat Feb-04-06 06:00 AM
Original message
Dowd-Didn't See It Coming, Again--(WH is "culturally illiterate")
Edited on Sat Feb-04-06 06:26 AM by rodeodance
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html?URI=http://selec... (5Q5Bl
> Didn't See It Coming, Again
> by Maureen Dowd
> The New York Times
> February 1, 2006
>
> Washington
>
> The White House should hire an anthropologist.
>
> Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign policy team doesn't understand any of the markets where it is barging around ineptly trying to sell America and democracy.
>
> The brand value of America has been in steady decline. The state of the union is sour but the state of the world is chilling, thanks to a hideously ham-handed Bush foreign policy crew that was once billed as a seasoned "dream team."
>
> The more the White House tries to force-feed democracy to tempestuous parts of the world, the more it discovers that you may be able to spin and scare voters in the U.S., but the Middle East is not so easy to manipulate. W. believes in self-determination only if he's doing the determining. Fundamentalists in America like to vote for Mr. Bush, but elsewhere they're violently opposing him.
>
> It's stunning that nearly four decades after Vietnam, our government could be even more culturally illiterate and pigheaded. The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react.
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