Stand Tall

The redoubtable (i.e., you should doubt him twice) Andy Klein reviews Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure, a documentary on Abu Ghraib.

From the first paragraph:

But his focus here is not merely on the notorious events at Abu Ghraib prison, but on the photographs that exposed a world of abuse and made the American people realize, if only briefly, what the rest of the world already knew – that the Bush administration has brought forth all that is worst about us and has destroyed any claim our nation may have had to moral stature.

Yes, of course, that's how things work. The actions of a few people over a short period of time decide a nation's moral stature. That why, after World War II, when we killed many POWs without trial, firebombed and nuked hundreds of thousands of civilians, and put our own citizens in internment camps for years--all because of those lunkheads FDR and Truman--we had no moral stature left.