With the inaugural post on USANow, I'd like to simply say that I'm proud of our great nation. The growing tide of anti-Americanism around the world has me a little confused, saddened, and angry.

We have German politicians getting elected due in part to an anti-American platform, we have Mexicans chanting "Osama!" at US soccer matches, and we have the Brittish slamming George Bush at every opportunity.

Considering our great nation employs hundreds of thousands of Mexicans (both legal and illegal)who in turn send $ back home, and considering the fact that we have rolled out the proverbial red carpet to Mexican families settling in the US, the American backlash in Mexico is quite disturbing. We spend tens of millions of dollars annually publishing documents in Spanish, programming ATMs to support Spanish, programming customer support lines to respond in Spanish, all in an effort to make our country comfortable for Mexican immigrants. We also spend millions of tax dollars every year teaching English as a Second Language in our public schools. We, as a nation, have more or less encouraged Mexican immigration to the point where Mexicans are no longer a minority in many southwest cities. Make no mistake - the US/Mexico relationship has indeed proven to be mutually beneficial, and the influence of Mexican family values and religious devotion has been quite positive. Yet our young athletes travel to Mexico to compete in soccer, and they're taunted with the name of history's greatest murderer of American civilians? Who/what is to blame for this? George Bush?

There can be no argument that the United States has been Great Brittain's greatest ally over the past century. Newspaper headlines from the U.K. which read "REDNECK ALERT" and "We Just Don't Like Bush" are therefore incomprehensible. Can you imagine Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher, or any other U.K. leader being greeted like that, regardless of whether our media agrees with his or her policies? Isn't some minimum level of respect warranted when our president travels overseas? It seems the French have always had a disdain for America (and to a lesser extent, Americans), but when did the Brittish adopt this point of view?

Is this backlash justified? Does the rest of the world have legitimate reasons to hate the USA? Is George W. Bush to blame? Is it a specific policy, such as the war on terrorism? Will the rest of the world hate us until we as a nation take a political and moral turn to the left? My answers would be No, No, No, No, and unfortunately, Yes.