What kind of nation, indeed.

Pen put up a link to an article by Peggy Noonan the other day I wanted to comment on. Specifically, this part:

Because we do not communicate to our immigrants, legal and illegal, that they have joined something special, some of them, understandably, get the impression they've joined not a great enterprise but a big box store. A big box store on the highway where you can get anything cheap. It's a good place. But it has no legends, no meaning, and it imparts no spirit.

Who is at fault? Those of us who let the myth die, or let it change, or refused to let it be told. The politically correct nitwit teaching the seventh-grade history class who decides the impressionable young minds before him need to be informed, as their first serious history lesson, that the Founders were hypocrites, the Bill of Rights nothing new and imperfect in any case, that the Indians were victims of genocide, that Lincoln was a clinically depressed homosexual who compensated for the storms within by creating storms without . . .

You can turn any history into mud. You can turn great men and women into mud too, if you want to.

And it's not just the nitwits, wherever they are, in the schools, the academy, the media, though they're all harmful enough. It's also the people who mean to be honestly and legitimately critical, to provide a new look at the old text. They're not noticing that the old text--the legend, the myth--isn't being taught anymore. Only the commentary is. But if all the commentary is doubting and critical, how will our kids know what to love and revere? How will they know how to balance criticism if they've never heard the positive side of the argument?

We've got a word for that when you teach something that isn't actually true in order to instill some belief in an impressionable mind. Indoctrination. And if our history, and more importantly, our present actions, are such that a young mind must be indoctrinated in order to hold fast to those ideals, then we have lost what it means to be an American.

I'll echo another portion of her article:

We fought a war to free slaves. We sent millions of white men to battle and destroyed a portion of our nation to free millions of black men. What kind of nation does this?

My answer: Not us. The Civil War wasn't fought over slavery--it was fought over the right of the states to secede, the ultimate in States' Rights. Instead of looking at this part of history though, let's look at some more present-day events, keeping in mind the question, "What kind of nation does this?"

• Torture
• Spying on its own citizens
• Indefinite detention of its own citizens without trial
• Falsification of intelligence to support an invasion of a country that presented no immediate threat to the security of this nation
• Allowing the chief executive to disregard existing law and constitutional principles at will
• Singling out minorities for discrimination, going so far as to attempt to amend the constitution of the US to allow it
• do i really need to go on?

So answer me this, Ms. Noonan: exactly what kind of nation does this?