Via wood s lot, I found a link to Better Angels of our Nature: There Is No Honor:
There is no honor.How about another sanctimonious bromide: Our true character is shown when we are alone and no one is looking. We see what evil we are capable of when we think no one is looking. We see how poorly we behave even when we know the whole world is watching. The Bush Administration was only able to do what it did by counting on the support of the American people; the blood is on our hands; the shame is ours. Lord, forgive us.
I saw Don Rumsfeld's testimony today, and there is no honor. Certainly, the other men present at the witness table did not acquit themselves well, but in the end, it comes down to Rumsfeld and the President. And there is no honor.
'Who was in charge? What was the chain of command?' Simple questions, these. Asked by John McCain, an honorable man. Simple questions, deserving of a simple answer. But the simple answer never made it past the lips of the Secretary. There were evasions and dodges, a dance of deceit, if you will.
No one was in charge, it seems--because that way, the only people who suffer punishment are the sergeants and privates in the photographs and videos. And as for the chain of command, well...uh...well, that was left behind somewhere in the recesses of the Pentagon. And there is no honor in that.
[snip]
And just when you thought one side had the market cornered on moral hypocrisy, you had Saint Joe Lieberman, patron saint of pious sanctimony, try to wash away the sins of Abu Ghraib by saying that since the Secretary had apologized (the way a six-year-old apologizes, only after being caught red-handed with the broken hards of pottery in his hands), and the 9/11 hijackers hadn't, that made things better.
I thought the world of Joe, once. Not anymore--I despise his empty bromides, his saccharine piety. If there was any way I could run against him in two years, I would. Hey, Sen. Dodd, there's something you can do with all that money you're squirrelling away: get someone to run against this sorry excuse for a Democrat.
[snip]
In the end, the only thing we have in this life, as people and as a nation, is our honor. This Administration has grieviously tarnished our national honor, by their deeds and their attitudes. What the sergeants and privates did at Abu Ghraib--and, it must be mentioned, other places and other times, from the beginning of this war till now--wasn't done in a vacuum. It was done because people from the bottom all the way to the top didn't think it was a matter worthy of condemnation until the whole world knew about it.
