The case for American exceptionalism

What's exceptional about America? Jeff Jarvis, and his readers, have some thoughts. (Thanks to Susan for spotting this one for me.)

And here is what Henry Kissinger said on a recent program of Think Tank:

Henry KISSINGER: No. There’s no country that you can come as a fifteen-year-old, speak all your life with an accent, become Secretary of State during a period when the president is under siege, have almost presidential powers, and while I got many nasty letters I never got a letter saying 'who are you to be in this position?'. That couldn’t happen anywhere else. And there’s no other country that, even when it’s naive, that thinks of itself as defined by freeing people from oppression, helping the needy, always available. I mean, you take just recently the earthquake in Iran. Nobody said, 'Why would we help people who have been so hostile? Who have an American flag at the airport tarmac so that people have to walk over it and get into the airplane?' Nobody says that and nobody feels it. So in that sense America is an absolutely unique country.