Moral Reciprocity AKA The Golden Rule

The problem with Bush is that he took American virtue as a given. He thought it was given to him like his last name. Like the rich spoiled kid he is, he never acted with virtue but took full advantage of it for his own use. Morality was always a monologue for him, never a dialogue.

"Harry Truman, who George W. Bush often praised but never understood, once said that “We all have to recognize—no matter how great our strength—that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.” To Bush and Cheney and Palin, the sentiment is offensive. Why should America not do as it pleases? After all, since our power stems from our virtue, the more unrestrained we are, the more good we will do."

Peter Beinart relates that quote to Obama's Oslo speech accepting the Nobel Prize.

"But Barack Obama, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech Thursday morning, showed that he understands just what Truman meant. Because he understands, in a way Cheney and Palin never will, that true moral universalism requires recognizing that Americans are just as capable of evil as anyone else. And that means recognizing that we are in just as much need of restraint. For Obama and Truman, the paradox of American exceptionalism is that only by recognizing that we are not inherently better than anyone else, and thus must bind our power within a framework of law, can we distinguish ourselves from the predatory powers of the past."

You can't overturn 8 years of Bush overnight, but this is the step in the correct moral direction.

Source: Daily Beast