Metaphorical left

In a new column at the Weekly Standard, Mirengoff launches right into it. I've excerpted the first few paragraphs below, but don't miss reading the whole thing:

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY professor Alex Hinton has warned that our government's prosecution of the war on terror may be causing us to resemble the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal gang that once ran Cambodia. In a piece titled "Lessons from killing fields of Cambodia--30 years on," published in the Christian Science Monitor last month, Hinton concluded that "the Khmer Rouge teach us difficult lessons about ourselves and the world in which we live." The chief lesson, according to Hinton, is that we risk heading down "their path to evil" through our conduct "right now in the war on terror." Hinton's piece, of little consequence in its own right, represents a specimen of the left's use of the war on terror to deconstruct American values.

To negate Hinton's bizarre analogy, one need only recall the history of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror. Hinton, without irony, does this himself. The Cambodian government, he notes, collectivized production and consumption, forced essentially its "entire population" into backbreaking and unceasing labor, abolished freedom of worship, cut off contact between its citizens and the outside world, attempted to control what the public "ate and did every day," and — oh yes — caused the death of more than 1.7 million of the country's 8 million inhabitants.

Inasmuch as the U.S. government has done none of the above, in what respect does Hinton think we are coming to resemble the Cambodian mass murderers? Well, for one thing we are not always politically correct. Hinton notes that most of us have "used euphemisms and stereotypes, followed instructions better questioned, succumbed to peer pressure, disparaged others, and become desensitized to the suffering of others." Not only that, but we have "turned a blind eye to what our government should not be doing." Specifically (and this is the only specific Hinton supplies) our government has engaged in torture, as did the Khmer Rouge. But we have we hardly turned a "blind eye" to this. The disgraceful conduct at Abu Ghraib was widely condemned; indeed, our government began investigating the matter even before it came to light. Where's the Cambodian analog? More fundamentally, it would be obscene to compare the actions at Abu Ghraib with genocide. In fact, Hinton presents no evidence that our government has intentionally killed even one foreign terrorist in our custody, much less 1.7 million of its citizens.