Don't cry for me, Argentina

What the hell has happened to this place?

This used to be a can-do country. We put a man on the moon. We beat the Nazis and the Communists. We invented the turducken.

And now, under seven years of George W. Bush – the worst president ever – we have become a nation of crybabies.

This week alone, the brave U.S. Senate passed a motion 72 to 25 “to express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus.”

This was because the group Moveon.org had placed an ad in The New York Times questioning whether Petraeus was cooking the books in his testimony before Congress about how things are going in Iraq.

Bush got in on it too, whining at a press conference: “The ad was disgusting. I felt like the ad was an attack, not only on General Petraeus but on the U.S. military.”

Bullshit.

Have we now come to the point where you can't criticize an army general? Isn't that the way they used to do things in those banana republics in Latin America?

Now the latest “outrage” is that the Iranian president wanted to visit Ground Zero, the site of the WTC attacks, when he's in town for the U.N. General Assembly meeting.

And all the usual suspects got in a lather. The politicians and the tabloids and the talk radio hatemongers and Fox "News" blowhards got self-righteous and said it would somehow be an insult.

Huh? Iran didn't attack us on 9/11. Sure, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not a particularly nice guy, but is he any worse than a score of other dictators and thugs who do whatever they want when they visit the U.S.?

Nixon engaged our great Commie enemy Khrushchev in the famous “kitchen debate.”

We used to be a country that wasn't afraid to engage our enemies instead of whining about them being nasty - and instead of acting like a spoiled 8-year-old refusing to invite little Tommy to his birthday party because he was mean to him during recess.

Pathetic.