Blowback of Chimpy's Policies

There was an article in today's New York Times about Putin's grip on power in Russia. It contained this nugget:

Tanya Lokshina, the chairwoman of a Russian human rights organization, the Demos Center for Information and Research, was among those who met with Ms. Rice on Saturday. She said that given the focus on security matters, the meeting with rights campaigners had been mostly symbolic.

She contended that the United States had “lost the high moral ground,” and thus should join with European countries to make it clear to Mr. Putin that a drift further away from democracy was unacceptable diplomatically. “The American voice alone doesn’t work anymore,” she said after the meeting. “The Russians are not influenced by it.”

A nation that uses torture, imprisons people without trial and engages in aggression has no claim to the moral high ground. The Russians recognize that, as does most of the rest of the world (as defined as "everyone other than the Administration and its Kool-Aid drinking supporters). It is no accident that Laura Bush is raising her public profile. She is about the only member of the regime of Der Monkey Fuhrer who has not been tarred with incompetence and human rights abuses.

There are real consequences to the misdeeds of the Bush Administration. One of the more serious is that we, as a nation, are giving cover to the bad actors in the rest of the world. that may not be remedied by Chimpy sending the First Robot out to do his job for him.