I'd rather read "The Fountainhead" where Johnny Galt throws a tantrum and smashes his letter-block building, because he says it's "MINE! MINE!" and the grown-ups won't let him stack them to spell "P-O-O-P."

"Either you have patience for the idea of American exceptionalism, or you do not."
American exceptionalism is simply a hypocritical front for American EXPANSIONISM, and it was "liberals" who introduced it under Wilson, and then FDR, seeking excuses to expand an oligarchy-depleted base of resources following the monopolist-debacle of Reconstruction. Libertarians may fail via their attempt to reform the incorrigible, i.e. to impose Founding precepts upon an empire which violates all Founding laws; however liberals attempt to expand this flaw globally. Correction can only come through discrete sovereignty-- never oligopoly; and until this discrete sovereignty is restored, then we have de facto statism.

Of course this is all simply a grand illusion, by which centralized statism keeps the populus perpetually hoodwinked, but has been the modus operandi of political statism throughout history-- and of which pundits such as Stewart, Limbaugh, Carville and Hannity are simply finger-puppets of the same hand-- and the "news" is simply a "Punch & Judy" type puppet-show by which each side blames the other for all of society's misfortunes-- and the populace is thus kept divided and turned against the other, and is thus kept from recognizing and opposing centralized statism as the real enemy. Rather, this follows the "Pied Piper" mentality of pathological Sociopathy, where a sociopath attracts followers with exaggerated claims of impossible plans (i.e. "100,00 more policemen" to fight crime)-- and then when these plans inevitably fail, the sociopath simply blames those who opposed him, and then goes on to other "plans" (i.e. 100,000 more TEACHERS to fight illiteracy).
And it's getting near time to pay the piper.

I'm afraid that this misses the point: this isn't simple "hypocrisy" so much as DIVISION-- as in "divide and conquer," i.e. the public is divided by the reigning oligarchy into two opposing factions which both have valid points against the other, but it "lets not the right hand know what the left is doing."

In other words, each side rationalizes or condemns certain actions, according to a "generosity bias" depending not on the act itself, but the identity of the actor-- i.e. whether they agree with the actor's ideology. In reality, centralized government inevitably escalates toward tyranny, since there is no such thing as benevolent or limited dictatorship or statism; however the subjective viewpoints createdy by partisanship-- and the illusion of control it represents, as with the current illusion of "democracy" within a faceless "republic--" simply maintains this division, via each side simply blaming the other for allegedly thwarting its otherwise-perfect plans for achieving Utopia. (continued)