Catching up on this thread, it seems the sirs-plane position is that despite "blips" that mar what would otherwise be a perfect record of exemplary conduct, the "good" done by the U.S., primarily in the form of aid packages outshines the little "blips" in the record, leaving the U.S. the greatest country not only on earth today but in all of recorded history.
I guess where it all starts to fall apart is when one takes a good look at the "blips," the big "blips" being the genocide of the American Indians and slavery, either one of which by itself would permanently disqualify the U.S. from being the greatest anything anywhere. There are plenty of good countries doing good in the world which were not built on either genocide or slavery. However, slavery and genocide are but the tip of the iceberg - - we also have to consider the slave trade itself, 100 years of lynch law and Jim Crow, the KKK, the millions killed in the Vietnam War, the half-million massacred in Indonesia with the direct complicity of the CIA, the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Central and South America and the institution of death squads and torture states from Guatemala to Chile, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran and the installation of another torture-state there, the Shah and his SAVAK secret police, the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the murder of Che Guevara, the decades-long support of the Duvalier torture-state in Haiti and its counterpart, the Trujillo regime in the DR, and the Batista regime in Cuba and the on-going rape of the Third World (as detailed in the book "Confessions of an Economic Hit-Man.") "Balanced out" by it "generous" foreign aid contributions the way a mattress "balances" on a bottle of wine, using Dylan's analogy.
I often feel like I was entering some kind of Bizarro World when I encounter the arguments of plane and sirs on the moral superiority of the U.S.A. over the rest of us poor dumb schmucks. Someplace where you can inflict the most horrific atrocities on your fellow man, torturing and killing millions, burning children alive in the arms of their mothers not once but thousands and hundreds of thousands of times and then "balance" it all out by writing a cheque that basically solves nothing for anybody and claiming moral superiority over the world on the basis of it.
I guess what I really would like to know is do they really think they are fooling ANYBODY with this bizarre BS? Do they believe it themselves? (I really think they do.) Why doesn't the rest of the world believe it then? Is everyone else really, really stupid? My own theory is that they are psychologically unready to come to grips with the simple but harsh reality of America's crimes and misdemeanours. It helps to erect a fictitious "good America" whose grossly exaggerated and otherwise almost mythical "good deeds" overbalance any "blips" like genocide or slavery that are unavoidably and eternally stuck there in the historical record.