Sarah Palin's ignorant imperialism. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

Sarah Palin's ignorant imperialism. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine: "The British hawks, like Palin, saw self-restraint as wimpy and dangerous. If Britain retreated from the tax policies that had provoked the Tea Party, they warned, the colonists would take this as 'Proofs of our Weakness, Disunion and Timidity.' Miller writes, 'Few Englishmen believed that the mother country could retain its sovereignty if it retreated in the face of such outrage: it was now said upon every side that the colonists must be chastised into submission.'

Palin thinks American power is above apology because it's 'a force for good throughout this world.' But Britain saw itself the same way. In their own eyes, Miller explains, Englishmen,
the terror of the evildoers of the world, could no longer sit still while a knot of agitators and firebrands in their own colonies sought to destroy the empire. If England were to continue to hold up her head in Europe as a great power, she could not permit 'a petty little province, the creature of our own hands, the bubble of our breath,' to hurl defiance across the Atlantic with impunity."