[+/-] Defending liberals abroad but not at home

Katrina vanden Heuvel draws some intriguing parallels between the state of democracy in the Ukraine and in the US:

On the hypocrisy meter: Consider how the Ukrainian protesters' charges of election fraud have been treated so seriously by Bush and his team, while they dismiss such charges when they are raised here at home. And how exactly does the Bush Administration--which has said that it cannot accept the results of the Ukrainian presidential election as legitimate "because it does not meet international standards"--explain why those international standards don't apply to the US? What right does this Administration have to lecture Ukraine when Bush came to office in a non-violent coup d'etat in 2000, and when numerous reports document that the 2004 election was marred by GOP voter suppression and intimidation tactics, flawed voting equipment and unexplained discrepancies between exit polls and official results in key swing states?

Now think back to January, 2001, when Congress was finalizing the Electoral College votes. Imagine that one Democratic Senator had joined with the members of the House who were trying to challenge the Florida votes. Picture in your mind what the last 4 years might have been like. Now ask yourself why this isn't happening now.

On a related note, check out how Pravda views all this:

The strongarm tactics used by the western stooge, Yushchenko, are typical of the anti-democratic processes set in motion by a rampant and militant Washington, crushed in the grip on a monetarist, neo-conservative crypto-fascist clique of elitists, whose corporate greed speaks louder than the mores of international diplomacy and whose thirst to dominate the world's resources in the lifetimes of Rumsfeld and Cheney throws any moral concept into the trash bin. [via AndrewSullivan]

Hey W! Thanks for restarting the cold war, you fucking dumbass chimp.