BARONE

Posted at 11:22 a.m. ET

One of our favorite writers here is Michael Barone, who probably knows more about American politics than anyone else, and has an ability to cut through the college-boy haze that gets thrown up by the mainstream media.  Barone writes of something that has bothered many of us - this new administration's indifference to human rights, something that has increasingly characterized "liberal" movements since the 1960s.

On the last day of her trip to East Asia, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke briefly of the place of human rights in American policy toward China. "Our pressing on those issues" -- issues she didn't identify any more fully -- "can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis."

Cries of dismay quickly came forth from Amnesty International USA, New Students for a Free Tibet and Freedom House. Has the United States given up on championing human rights and democracy altogether?

Not good, not good.

...for anyone with knowledge of American foreign policy over the last four decades, Clinton's remarks were jarring. It is one thing not to press a tyranny very hard on human rights; it is another thing to come out and say you're not going to raise the issue at all. It is a kind of unilateral moral disarmament.

Who is at fault?

She is not the only one. On this as on other matters, she is following the lead of the man who beat her for the Democratic nomination. In his inaugural speech, Barack Obama made only the most passing mention of human rights. In his Feb. 26 speech to Congress, he devoted just 7 percent of his words to foreign and defense policy, and made just one mention of freedom.

That one mention is more than his usual number.  And...

He is reportedly poised to name as head of the National Intelligence Council a man who has endorsed China's 1989 suppression of pro-democracy students at Tiananmen Square. He has noted with cold indifference the success of the provincial elections in Iraq.

That naming - the man is Charles Freeman Jr. - has already occurred. 

All of which brings to mind the report of a conservative blogger who watched George W. Bush's 2005 inaugural speech with a group of liberals. Every time Bush called for spreading freedom and democracy around the world, the crowd guffawed and groaned and jeered.

I'm afraid that's what we're seeing.

Beneath this stated contempt is, I think, something in the nature of secret guilt. Or rather, anger at the notion that Bush had stolen the issues of human rights and democracy from the liberals.

Excellent point.  I'm glad someone made it.

The desire to oppose the Iraq war root and branch, to denounce every aspect of it, imposed a duty to dismiss as laughable Bush's stated objective -- set out eloquently before the decision to take military action as well as after it -- of advancing democracy in the Middle East.

Yup.

It's quite a turnaround. It was liberals who complained that the United States sided with too many tyrannies in the Cold War and who (in the person of Henry Jackson) insisted on holding up Soviet trade deals to aid those persecuted by the Soviet Union.

Those days are long gone.

Perhaps someone should suggest that a stony indifference to the freedom of others is not a very liberal -- not a very generous, not a very attractive -- thing.

Wonderfully stated.  Bush Derangement Syndrome is still alive and well in the liberal establishment.  Ironically, it was 47 years ago when a liberal president, John F. Kennedy, committed this country to pay any price in defense of freedom.   Today, Kennedy would be denounced as a militaristic neocon, and couldn't come close to getting his party's nomination.

March 1, 2009.