Hu Jintao and Barack Obama

Hu Jintao got an earful from us on his human rights records. Stop the repression of Uighurs and Tibetans. Stop jailing political dissidents. Allow more freedom of the Internet and the press.

But on his way home, Hu must be thinking to himself: Who are these Americans to lecture us?

Is this not the same tribe that enslaved black people for 250 years and segregated them for a century? Is this not the same tribe that drove the Indians off their lands, then stuck them all in Bantustans called reservations? Are these not the only people in history to have dropped atomic bombs on defenseless cities?

How would we have reacted if Hu, instead of pretending he couldn’t hear the translation of that question about human rights, retorted, “We Chinese are also concerned about what we read of human rights at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, of renditions, torture and something called ‘water-boarding.’”

This is not written in defense of the Chinese communists who are a purposeful and ruthless lot, but to suggest that we Americans no longer look like the self-confident nation of Dwight Eisenhower and JFK that was unintimidated by the brutal and bullying Soviet Union of Nikita Khrushchev.

We were in a great struggle then—and acted like we could win it.

But as America sinks economically and retreats strategically, while China grows at 10 percent and bristles with confidence, we appear to be a nation of whiners. They are eating our lunch, and we sound like losers in a locker room.

We demand that the Chinese be more open and tolerant of opposition and dissent. But when they look at the gridlock of American democracy, the pettiness of our politics and the failure of our policies, while they are on the move at home and all over the world, why should they want to be more like us?

Has our American capitalism in this century performed as well as their autocratic capitalism? Is our political performance an argument for the superiority of our ballyhooed democracy over their one-party state?

We can’t win or end our wars, balance our budgets or control our borders. Great states like California and Illinois appear about to go belly-up. The U.S. government is running a third straight deficit of near 10 percent of our entire economy. We used our stimulus money to save government jobs. They used theirs for bullet trains.

Time to see ourselves as others see us.