If you want to learn what’s going on in the world, the Sunday morning interview programs are probably the last place you would turn.

However, once in a while some honesty does slip out from one of their guests.

An example comes from yesterday’s Face The Nation, on which one of the guests was Edmund Morris, a Keynan-born writer “best known for his biographies of United States presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan”.

In responding to the moderator’s question about how Roosevelt would judge today’s politics, a question construct he rightly called BS on (literally), Morris noted that Roosevelt, unlike most recent presidents, understood foreign cultures, acting forcefully yet civilized with them.

He went on to say that, as an immigrant to this country, he has some perspective on how the rest of the world sees the US.

And it ain’t pretty.

And I’m aware of the– the fact that people elsewhere in the world think differently from us. I can sort of see us, us Americans with their eyes. And not all that I see is– is attractive. I see an insular people who are– are insensitive to foreign sensibilities, who are lazy, obese, complacent and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined.

I wouldn’t go so far as to paint our entire population with that brush.

However, insensitivity, laziness, complacency, and perplexed about our place in the world perfectly characterizes far too many of our political and business “leaders”, and especially most of the news media that is supposed to hold them accountable.