[QUOTE=retina;489359]In a way it does. It suggests a single free world, and it's leader.[/quote]
"It" referring to the description of the US President as "leader of the free world."
[quote]Either way the original wording is, at best, confusing, and at worst insincere and condescending.[/QUOTE]
I don't presume to judge the sincerity of the OP.

The phrase "leader of the free world," as well as the modern usage of the term "free world," originated during the Cold War. Since the Cold War ended a generation ago, I suppose the phrase may be viewed as obsolete or archaic, and perhaps confusing, since it at least implicitly refers to a situation that no longer exists. If [i]Il Duce[/i] and his enablers aren't checked soon, of course, the term "free world" may not mean much anyhow.

Meanwhile, some commentators have tried to drop the mantle on Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron, apparently believing [i]Il Duce[/i] to be unworthy of it.

Re. leader of the free world:

o Slavery was legal in all 13 original colonies and a crucial pillar of the economics of most of them in 1776. Moreover there are plausible arguments to be made that the *real* reason for the U.S. revolutionary war had less to do with "freedom" than it did with the economic interests of wealthy landowners in the colonies.

o Any reasonable U.S. claim to being a "free country", much less self-anointed leader of some kind of global collection of such, definitively evaporated in the wake of 9/11. See my (as soon as I finish this one) posting in "All your data are belong to us" for the latest examples of how far the police-state project has come, and where its heading.

[QUOTE=retina;489359]"The leader of one of the 92 free countries".
[/QUOTE]
That is wrong, you forget some country which is only 73% free, it has to be "The leader of one of the 92.73 free countries... :leaving:

[QUOTE=LaurV;489413]That is wrong, you forget some country which is only 73% free, it has to be "The leader of one of the 92.73 free countries... :leaving:[/QUOTE]Is that like being only a little bit pregnant?

[size=1]Actually the USA has the largest prison population, by percentage, of all countries, free or not. One wonders just how free it really is. Statistics can be awesome sometimes. :devil:[/size]

[QUOTE=retina;489423]Is that like being only a little bit pregnant?

[SIZE=1][U]Actually the USA has the largest prison population, by percentage, of all countries, free or not. One wonders just how free it really is.[/U] Statistics can be awesome sometimes. :devil:[/SIZE][/QUOTE]
Thank you for bringing up the question of "freedom." The US not only has massive incarceration, but even more massive surveillance.

[QUOTE=retina;489423]Actually the USA has the largest prison population, by percentage, of all countries, free or not. One wonders just how free it really is. Statistics can be awesome sometimes. :devil:[/QUOTE]
Not only highest percentage, but highest actual number of inmates as well. I'm sure the following has nothing -- nothing at all -- to do with this situation.

An [url=https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/]April 2016 [b]Harper's[/b] article[/url] by Dan Baum has the following fruits of a 1994 interview with John Ehrlichman:
[quote]In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results?

[snip]

I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”[/quote]

Re. Nixon kicking off the War On Drugs - note the great irony: Perhaps the best claim the U.S. had to being something resembling its founding myths was in the wake of the successes of the civil rights era, mid-to-late 60s. Nixon wasted no time in undoing those gains by other means, and none of his successors made any credible effort to reverse said reversal, typically quite the opposite. And again this stuff is bipartisan - Reagan (recall Nancy's "just say no" advice to ghetto kids?) was a staunch supporter or the carceral state, and Bill Clinton's now infamous [url=https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/04/11/bill-clinton-black-lives-and-the-myths-of-the-1994-crime-bill]1994 crime bill[/url] (which both Clintons campaigned hard for - WJC via stuff like his personally overseeing an execution of a mentally impaired black man in his home state of Arkansas and then bragging about how it proved his tough-on-crime bona fides; HRC via speeches, one of which included her characteriation of young black men as 'superpredators' - and these 2 claim to be 'liberal', lol) was a further big step in the wrong direction. Obama, as is his wont, speechified a lot about doing the right thing, but his actions were decidely in the opposite direction; in fact he dramatically accelerated the rise of [url=https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/10/obama-police-militarization_n_3566478.html]militarized policing[/url] and the crime-by-the-state known as civil asset forfeiture (which is now a larger form of theft than all other put together) on multiple fronts. No idea what the Trump administration's numbers are in these regards, but I'd be shocked if they did anything other than continue/exacerbate the status quo.

[b]Edit:[/b] Re. last sentence of above, well that didn't take long - a Twofer! More inmates and sends a strong warning message to wannabe illegal entrants (again, not that Obama's record re. deportation of same was any better, it was merely under less-overtly-hostile cover):

[url=https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-prisons-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-sending-1600-immigration-detainees-to-federal-prisons-idUSKCN1J32W1]Exclusive: U.S. sending 1,600 immigration detainees to federal prisons[/url] | Reuters

Saw this bumper sticker today:

Love People
Cook them. tasty food!

I wonder who added the period.

[QUOTE=rogue;489653]I wonder who added the period.[/QUOTE]

Possibly the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone)]Kanamits[/url]?

[QUOTE=rogue;489653]Love People
Cook them. tasty food![/QUOTE][url]https://jalopnik.com/5724684/virginia-dmv-revokes-worlds-greatest-license-plate[/url]

[QUOTE=rogue;489653]Saw this bumper sticker today:

Love People
Cook them. tasty food!

I wonder who added the period.[/QUOTE]
[url=https://www.penzeys.com/shop/fun-stuff/]Penzey's[/url] offers gift cards (but not bumper stickers, as far as I could see) with the slogan "Love People. Cook them tasty food" (no period after "them").

Bumper stickers as you describe are available from [url=https://www.zazzle.com/love_people_cook_them_tasty_food_bumper_sticker-128392887910086769]Zazzle[/url].