Alexis,
I hope you will spot me a slight quibble or 2. In fairness to Washington I should note that if he imitated English fashions prior to 1776 it would have been because he was indeed a patriotic Englishman. Independence didn’t happen on a whim but because a lot of the Founding Fathers really felt they had no choice. In his case the real question would be whether he still followed such fashions at the end of the Revolution. I seem to recall the answer was no. Jefferson’s desire to attract European professors would probably have been on a par with the more successful desire to attract English engineers(Isaac Asimov had an interesting article on that in one of the past issues of Fantasy & Science-Fiction which unfortunately is too far in the past for me to cite from memory. >_<), which is to say that at the time European technology was somewhat ahead of American technology and the Americans felt it wise to close that gap. Not exactly my notion of self-loathing.

As for Crazy Khadaffy, he's opened himself for mockery with that one. And we would be unwise to turn it down. Islam is really such a lousy religion that the only way they can get people to listen to their sermons is to bribe them at 80 Euros an hour?O_O

Did they perhaps get extra for pretending to stay awake? O_O

Just goes to show how badly Islam sucks! ^_~