Rogue state

A single nation on the entire planet is so far outside of the mainstream of world opinion. Guess which one....

In December, the United Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1. This country was the one vote against.

This country re-elected an incumbent president who would have lost by a whopping 88% to 11% vote if the world's citizen's had been allowed to cast ballots.

This country is known to possess three types of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and biological weapons, and it is the only country to have used nuclear weapons in combat.

Fully 59% of this country's citizens say they believe the events in the Book of Revelation are going to come true, and nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the Sept. 11 attack.

This country contributes less foreign aid on a per-capita basis than almost any other industrialized nation, yet its citizens routinely perceive the country as more generous than it actually is. The average citizen believes that this nation spends 24 percent of its budget on assistance to developing nations, more than 20 times the actual figure.

This is the only industrialized country that doesn't provide free universal health coverage to its citizens. It also has the second-highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world.

Polls demonstrate that the global community is concerned with this country's levels of nationalism and religiosity and the United States’ tendency to sacrifice social safety nets. The polls also reveal that the world sees this country as dishonest, avaricious, and violent.

Since the end of its civil war in 1865 (fought over the right to hold slaves), the country has fought wars against or militarily occupied the following countries at one point or another (often on multiple occasions in different decades): Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Phillipines, Mexico, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.

We should think about some of these things next time we hear phrases like Axis of Evil and Rogue Nation tossed around.