Not Sure I Agree 100% With Your Police Work, Alec

Alec Baldwin, in what is otherwise a tame blog entry at The Huffington Post, wrote this howler:

The past eight years have been the moral low point of the American experience.

Mr. Baldwin, because I like you I'll chalk this up to the blogger's disease of writing without revising because as you probably do know, in absolute moral terms this country has sunk way lower. You've got your slavery, your genocide, your segregation. Back in the 1920s the KKK ran entire states (and not just southern ones). In West Virginia, being a union organizer could get you shot, and the government would do nothing. We were into public lynchings and women as chattel. We've lent our support to dictators who ripped off their countries and killed millions. Hell, this country wasn't an actual, functioning democracy until the Civil Rights Act and the abolition of the Poll Tax in 1964. So while I'm happy to say that George W. Bush is a moral idiot, and that his administration had done damage to this country from which it may never recover, whoever wins this fall, we're still not as bad as we've been.

Change the "the" to an "a", and problem solved, Mr. Baldwin.