Democracies & double standards Posted: February 23, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc. "Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together," Edmund Burke admonished the haughty rulers of the British Empire of his time. Our American empire is suffering from a similar want of wisdom and plenitude of the hubris that cost George III his 13 colonies. Consider how this generation of politicians is undoing the great work of Ronald Reagan. When Reagan took office in 1981, the Soviet Union of the aging autocrat Leonid Brezhnev...