Tim, far be it from me to defend George Soros, who has said some extraordinarily dumb things in the course of this electoral cycle. And he’s funded folks who are even worse. Nevertheless, looking carefully at Byron’s piece, it seems to me that Mr. Soros was saying that 9/11 and Abu Ghraib could be compared in the sense of their psychological impact on Americans. When it comes to politics, Soros may tip over into nonsense and bile on occasion, but, bad as the abuse was at Abu Ghraib, I don’t think even he would regard it as a horror equivalent to the mass murders of 9/11. If he does, he’s delusional. His point, however, (if I’ve understood it correctly) is that both 9/11 and Abu Ghraib were major psychological blows to this country, and there, I think, he’s onto something. In addition to the pain and loss of the 9/11 victims and those that mourned them, 9/11 was a terrible, and probably fatal, blow to America’s sense of its invulnerability, a sense that had somehow even managed to survive the tensions and dangers of the Cold War years. Abu Ghraib too was a bad blow to Americans’ sense of themselves, the sense that their troops are liberators, the good guys, something in which, given its history, this country, quite rightly, takes enormous pride. And no, discomfort and shame over what happened in that prison is by no means confined to the liberal elite.

That said, I think the psychological impact of 9/11 was, for obvious reasons, far, far worse, and will be infintely more durable, than Abu Ghraib, but I don’t think that it’s fair to reduce Soros’ argument to saying that “he suggested the prison abuse was equivalent to the terrorist attacks..” He’s a little more subtle than that, subtle, but still utterly misguided.