Consider the following.
At an international conference on democracy and human rights in Krakow, Poland, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton railed against governments intolerant of human rights:
“But we must be wary of the steel vise in which governments around the world are slowly crushing civil society and the human spirit,” she said. Social activists, Clinton said, are being harassed, censored, cut off from funding, arrested, prosecuted or killed.
President Obama unequivocally echoed her righteous sentiments in a public statement:
President Barack Obama, in a statement released in Washington, said the United States is particularly concerned about “the spread of restrictions on civil society, the growing use of law to curb rather than enhance freedom and widespread corruption that is undermining the faith of citizens in their governments.”
Then Dave Lindorff reels off around twenty reasons why they are such flagrant freaking hypocrites that their pants should be effectively on fire, while Glenn Greenwald has the temerity to call the US a police state in cahoots with British Petroleum.
Normally, I’d gladly join in the outrage at the blatant hypocrisy, but an alternative hypothesis has been creeping around in the back of my mind lately.