Secretary of Hypocrisy?

In case you were wondering whether we had a Secretary of State any more under the Bush Administration, Condoleezza Rice made another one of her occasional orchestrated photo ops, this one in Russia on Saturday Oct. 13, as she met with Russian human rights activists.

In what has to be one of the most incredible examples of this administration's complete lack of self-consciousness, she was quoted as making the following statement:

"In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development," Rice said. "I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma," said Rice, referring to the Russian parliament.

Now, just substitute "White House" for "Kremlin" in the first line of the previous paragraph, and "Congress" for "Duma." Now, try and imagine if those words were uttered with the slightest bit of irony.

Yeh, buddy. War is peace. Truth is lies. Occupation is liberation.