I&#x27;ll give you that our State Department&#x27;s grotesque levels of incompetence and stupidity don&#x27;t exactly make it hard for the foreign press to smear the United States; I find it entirely plausible that the same people who couldn&#x27;t be bothered to put bulletproof glass on a consulate in Libya would try to turn a European ally&#x27;s capital into an armed camp. That being said, I&#x27;ve still too often seen stories in foreign papers painting perfectly anodyne American actions as the height of villainy to have any more faith in their reporting than I do in American papers&#x27;.