Obama love fest won't last...

This according to the Boston Globe which realistically is true. One of the most unrealistic things I heard stated during the course of the campaign is that other nations would start liking us more based on our President. Considering many of them disliked us under Clinton, and that 9/11 was actually planned when he was in office, it was hard to believe anyone bought that. Some excerpts from the article:

Sure enough, much of the international reaction to Obama's election has been ecstatic. "Legions of jubilant supporters set off firecrackers in El Salvador, danced in Liberia, and drank shots in Japan," the Los Angeles Times reported. Kenya declared a national holiday. South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu exulted: "We have a new spring in our walk and our shoulders are straighter." The Sun, Britain's most popular newspaper, headlined its story "One Giant Leap for Mankind."

For Obama, such worldwide jubilation must be gratifying. He should take it all with a healthy shake of salt, however. Because it isn't going to last.

Antagonism to the United States is as old as the United States. It didn't begin with the current president, unpopular though he is, or in response to American military action in Iraq. Nor is it going to vanish Jan. 20.

In "Hating America," a survey of more than two centuries of anti-American hostility, Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin note that an upsurge of anti-Americanism was already "strong in the Middle East and well under way in Europe" before Bush took office in 2001. In the 1990s, for example, Greeks opposed US support for Kosovo's Muslims, and vented their anger at President Bill Clinton. "Among the epithets flung at Clinton in the mainstream Greek media," the Rubins recount, "were criminal, pervert, murderer, imposter, bloodthirsty, gangster, slayer, naïve, criminal, butcher, stupid, killer, foolish, unscrupulous, disgraceful, dishonest, and rascal."

Then again, considering how many people don't seem to remember their history, maybe it's not surprising that many believed that the reason we were hated was related to George Bush. I remember my father complaining about going overseas decades ago, and not telling people he was even from the US on more than one occasion.