Liberals Love America Like O.J. Loved Nicole

Human Events, Jan 10, 2005 by Coulter, Ann

Even the United Nations sponge who called the United States "stingy" immediately retracted the insult, saying he had been misinterpreted and that the U.S. was "most generous." But The New York Times was sticking with "stingy." In an editorial subtly titied "Are We Stingy? Yes," the Times said the UN sponge "was right on target." This followed up a patriotic editorial a few days earlier titled "America, the Indifferent."

America's stinginess is a long-standing leitmotif for liberals, which is getting hard to square with their love for America. When it comes to heaping insults on America, U.S. liberals are the nation's leading donors.

Destabilizing France

In 2003, the Center for Global Development-funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, despite the fact that it could have used that money on future tsunami victims-concluded that the U.S. ranked 20th out of 21 nations in helping poorer nations. This came as a surprise, inasmuch as the U.S. gives the highest absolute amounts of foreign aid to the developing world.

But as the study explained, the center "assesses policy effort rather than impact." As any liberal can tell you, it's not results that count, it's intentions! In other words, the CGD discounted some countries' foreign aid because the CGD decided it was the sort of aid that wouldn't work-even if, in the end, it did work.

The CGD's evaluation of "effort" somehow managed to bump U.S. contributions from the No. 1 spot to second-to-last. Sending the military to liberate millions of people from ruthless dictators, for example, did not count as "aid," whereas sending in peacekeepers afterward did.

The U.S. did not merely write a check to help the oppressed people of Afghanistan and Iraq: The U.S. did most of the fighting and liberating as well as a significant share of the dying. Where's Michael Moore with that upto-the-minute body count of U.S. soldiers when you need him?

But in the words of the CGD, military aid doesn't count because "one country's security enhancement is another's destabilizing intervention"-you know, the way U.S. soldiers "destabilized" France in 1944. (My guess is, Presbyterian missionaries in the jungle don't get as many points as UN seminars on condom use either.)

Consequently, in 2003, Norway got 7.1 points for "peacekeeping." Denmark got 7.4 points. France got 5.2. The country that dispatched the TaIiban and Saddam Hussein-and, before that, ensured that the above countries would not be speaking German or Russian-got 1.5 points for "peacekeeping."

But at least we beat Japan! Except in other studies by liberals-who certainly do love their country-that claim Japan beats the U.S. in foreign aid donations.

I guess there are as many ways to calculate "aid" as there are to calculate "love of country."

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in 2003, the U.S. gave $37.8 billion out of a total $108.5 billion in foreign aid from the world's major countries-notable for being more than three times the amount from the next largest donor, the Netherlands, clocking in at $12.2 billion. Americans make up about 5% of the world's population and give about 35% of the aid.

At a minimum, in order to discount the largesse of the United States, one must carefully exclude gigantic categories of aid, such as military aid, food aid, trade policies, refugee policies, religious aid, private charities and individual giving.

However "aid" is calculated, it is not that hard to calculate someone's affection for their country based on their propensity to tell slanderous lies about it.