Since you are weary of the “searching under the streetlight” metaphor, I am hereby retiring it in favor of my new “climbing Mount Fuji” metaphor.

Basically, protesting American misdeeds is like climbing Mt. Fuji — easy to do, and not much of an accomplishment, so plenty of people do it. Other mountains, even if lesser-known, may in fact be much more dangerous and challenging.

Also, you can delete comments permanently in Blogger now, so they don’t even show up as “This post has been removed…” 

It seems that we agree on the basics, but disagree on matters of degree. You agree that dissent and internal criticism are necessary parts of our self-correcting political system, but you think the left is currently overdoing it. I agree that others are guilty of far worse, but think that in order to have international legitimacy we need to subject ourselves to greater scrutiny and hold ourselves to a higher standard.

I also should note that my comments are about Americans criticizing America. When America’s enemies point out our misdeeds to excuse their own sins, I consider it the same kind of “look over there” fallacy. 

To draw an unfortuate analogy, it’s like in The Godfather, when Michael tells Fredo not to take sides against the family. You can criticize Mike in private, but not in front of Moe Green.

My concern, therefore, is when Americans level criticism at America not to ultimately strengthen it, but to weaken it.

I sense that some, if not most, of the critics pounding away at the Abu Ghraib story are doing so not to help America preserve the moral legitimacy of its troops as they fight overseas, but to keep those troops home all together.