From this non-American’s POV, you people let one guy have far too much power. Makes me thank Og every day for our much more robust system of checks and balances.
You might want to consider changing your system 
They thought it was the right thing. One of the pitfalls of power is the relative ease with which some people end up thinking that they “know best”. Better than the people, better than the lawmakers…
The legal thing and the right thing aren’t always the same, but “the right illegal thing” is always dangerous country to thread.
Well, we thought we had robust checks and balances!
Regardless of one’s Constitutional and legal system, it still takes people to make the checks and balances work, and we had a bit of a perfect storm here the past few years. A President gone nuts, a legislative majority willing to go along (and a minority frequently cowed by the whole terror thing), the decades-long effort of conservatives to remake the judiciary in their own image finally bearing fruit, and a press that treated pro-war and ‘anti-terror’ measures as ‘serious’, and antiwar and pro-Constitutional rights opinions as unserious…you get the idea.
But the tide seems to be turning. A bit later than we would’ve liked, but it’s turning.
Stalin, Hitler etc have no bearing on this subject, to mention them is, IMHO irrelevent.
Most world powers throughout history have made monumental fuck ups and in this respect the USA is no different. To state they supported terrorism is I think wrong, they supported what they considred at the time to be legitimate causes.
I still stand by my earlier statement, I believe America to be basically decent and I also maintain that the US Govt. does what it feels to be right, again at the time
I think I follow what Chowder is saying, that Americans and even the US government, are not inherently malign.
Misguided, ill informed and sometimes just plain thick (especially the government - this is not a blanket insult) - but not actually malign.
It is not unreasonable for a State to put its interests ahead of the interests of others.
It also helps if people have a certain amount of foresight.
Hm. I thought this thread had been superseded by this one.
Remember that the American people were against the Vietnam War two-to-one from 1968 onward. (Discussed here.) But we didn’t pull our last troops out until 1974.
Another way of stating that was that the American people were staunchly behind the war through 1968 - or at least Tet, which is extraoridinary.
It’s amazing how many people on thie thread agree with Hermann Goering, who famously said (paraphrasing): If the people got to decide whether or not to go to war, there would be no wars – even plowboys understand that the most they personally are likely to get out of a war is a chace to return to their farm with their arms and legs intact."