Rush Limbaugh, like many on the right, is pretty convinced that the Democrats are through. ". . . I think the other people on the other side of the partisan divide are in the midst of a self-annihilation. I think they're plunging into depths from which they may never recover, which is, to me, only natural. You might look at time, age-old values, wrong versus right: wrong always catches up with you at some point. When you're wrong, it always catches up." That's convenient for Rush.
His argument is that liberals don't believe in American exceptionalism. We do, but not the way that Rush believes in it. Rush believes that American Exceptionalism means that whatever we do, as Americans, is pretty much the right answer. If we Americans install a crooked dictator in Latin America, well, we had the right to do it. If we invade Iraq for very tenuous reasons? That's our right, and the rest of the world should remember we saved their collective behinduses in world war 2 and cut us some slack.
Liberals believe that American Exceptionalism is a call to do better, not an affirmation of the rightness of whatever the hell it is we decide to do. It's a higher standard we set for ourselves. We are to be an example to the rest of the world. It's enough to just say we are an example--we actually have to set the example.
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