Condoleezza Rice, on her way to a NATO meeting yesterday, showed once more her penchant for jaw-dropping hypocrisy when she said with nothing even approaching shame:
Russia is a state that is unfortunately using the one tool that it has always used whenever it wishes to deliver a message and that's its military power. That's not the way to deal in the 21st century.
As Salon's Glen Greenwald says, "it's simply a fact that the U.S. invades, bombs, occupies, and interferes in the internal affairs of other countries far more than any other country on the planet. It's not even a close competition."
Has there been even one disagreement between the Bush administration and a non-allied foreign power in the past seven years that has been met with anything other than force, or the overt or implied threat of force, by the United States? Hell, they even changed the name of French Fries to "Freedom Fries" at the Capitol when France was against using military force against Iraq. Maybe now "Occupation Fries" would be more accurate.
Greenwald points out:
Just during the time Rice has served in the Bush administration, we bombed, invaded and occupied Afghanistan; did the same to Iraq; repeatedly bombed Somalia, killing all sorts of civilians; fed bombs to Israel as they invaded and bombed Lebanon; top political officials (led by John McCain and Joe Lieberman) have repeatedly threatened, and advocated, that the same be done to a whole host of other countries, including Iran and Syria.
Rice was one of the most prominent purveyors of neocon sloganeering of phrases including "smoking guns" and "mushroom clouds." She turned the State Department into the War Cheerleading Department. She appears before Congress to urge heightened aggression against Iran.
In the previous article bearing, in substantive part, the title of this one, I pointed out the statements Ms. Rice made about the Georgian conflict with Russia:
"This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can threaten a neighbor, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed."
And:
"I have heard the Russian president say that his military operations are over. I am saying it is time for the Russian president to be true to his word."
But Condi's cognitive dissonance is not the only unexplainable phenomenon we are dealing with here. She made all of her astonishingly dissonant statements before the press. Where were the questions from reporters about how her rhetoric doesn't come close to matching her past performance? Surely there are members of the mainstream press corps that aren't working for FOX. Surely some of them have alarm bells that go off when they hear these incongruent sermons being preached by the woman who has embraced the Bush Doctrine of "preemptive war" as tightly as any in his circle. But if there are some of those folks in the press, I haven't heard them asking any of the obvious questions.
Maybe they think that's Greenwald's job. Or Garrett's job. But if they happened to ask me, they'd find out that I would much prefer them to put me out of work, or at least be forced to find another topic to write about.
By JC Garrett
