Why does the Right hate American values?

Dean's World carries a piece called "Journalistic Sickness" that typifies the Right's disinterest in American values. Dean writes:

Prison abuses happen in every country, in every prison system. Worse things than Abu Ghraib happen every day in American prisons full of all-American criminals, and way worse happens every day in prisons in places like Saudi Arabia or Syria (and certainly did in Saddam's Iraq)--and by the way, pointing all that out is not about "excusing" anything, it's about perspective and making moral distinctions.

Harkonnendog has presented similar arguments here on Simianbrain, effectively, "The result of being the moral compass of the world was 9/11, so there's nothing wrong with ditching that kind of leadership."

I don't know who raised these folks, but I was raised by an officer in the United States Army who volunteered for Vietnam and served two tours in-country. My father displayed a purple heart and other medals on the wall, and my brother followed in his footsteps and currently serves in the Army National Guard.

I was raised to believe that America is better than dictatorships like Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Saddam's Iraq, and not in a way that requires intellectuals to make "moral distinctions" to arrive at that conclusion. If that's where the right is taking America, to a place where we get to weigh the relative brutalities of foreign hell holes versus the ones that we ourselves build in order to determine whether we're better or worse, I have this to say: We're worse than we were before, jackasses.

People who call themselves "Americans" but don't believe that America should stand for anything will leave us with a nation that doesn't. Pay attention, people. Every time they mock reports of torture, desecration, or the murder of detainees who've never been charged with or convicted of a crime they are mocking the idea that America is something different, better, and more hopeful than any other nation in the world.

If we're just like them, but maybe a little better when we feel like it, what's the point of fighting this war anyway?