What if you started reading a friend's private diary, and in it he took great pains to say how pathetic you were? That's pretty much the feeling you get reading the anti-American issue of Der Spiegel. The America hatefest starts with an angry Uncle Sam, and asks such pertinent questions as "Can Condoleezza Rice Emancipate Herself from Bush?" and "When Will America Collapse?" The German vision of America is a racist, broken country, and they're not afraid to pronounce us dead. Click for the full eulogy.The German problems with America aren't limited to our recent economic collapse. We have a host of faults to atone for, and while electing Obama would be a good start, we suck in so many other ways:

America is a superpower around the globe, but a Third World country at home, with an infrastructure that defies description. There are collapsing bridges, power failures along the entire East Coast, and homes in places like Florida, North Carolina and Texas are regularly destroyed every year by hurricanes that flatten houses as if they were beach bungalows in Haiti.

They even call the U.S. a Third World country. Wow.

They also have a dim view of American race issues, as in this essay by the chief of Der Spiegel's foreign desk, Gerhard Spörl:

Yes, the most obscene aspect of all remains the unacknowledged racism in this country of pragmatic enlightenment — the ongoing prejudices of whites against blacks."

That's complemented by interviews with Condi Rice, neocon Robert Kagan and Eric Foner, all of which feature Der Spiegel editors asking Americans: what exactly is wrong with you? Since the publication also blasts Nicolas Sarkozy in the same issue, is it time to start not hanging out with Germany so much?