James P. Rubin has a good opinion article in Newsweek, which takes a shot at Barack Obama’s realist tendencies in foreign policy and the swift abandonment of human rights by the new administration.  Given the scary results of a recent poll on the falling support for democracy building, perhaps he’s just going with the flow?  This isn’t looking good.

“Realism” characterized the views of a substantial majority of Americans almost right up until the moment that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. At that moment it seems Americans were galvanized into the delusional (at least by today’s standards) belief that we possessed some values which stood us apart from some of the rest of the world. And in the era of propaganda that followed the war, we continued to delude ourselves that America, for all of its flaws, really stood for something a little better than others. Heck, you couldn’t find any of the latter day “realists” anywhere — not under any rock anywhere.