Putin has the audacity to lecture America and the world on human rights: "...we must not forget that God created us equal."

The last paragraph from Putin's op-ed piece this week in the New York Times:

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

- Vladimir V. Putin is the president of Russia.

Vladmir Putin tries to lecture the U.S. about peace and human rights in this week's New York Times and fails.  He ignores that the fact that Syria has used chemical weapons (probably made with chemicals supplied by Russia) on its own people because Russia does not deeply care about human rights -- it never has nor does it care now.  Foremost for Putin is making Russia a great power on the world stage, like it was during the Soviet era.  

However, to be considered a great nation, you must act like one, and not jail or kill your domestic political opponents, not suppress democracy in your country, and not block constructive action at the UN on a whole host of human rights issues that are important to the civilized world.  

But this last sentence of Putin's op-ed really makes me mad for its hypocrisy: "we must not forget that God created us equal." No, Mr. Putin, we have not forgotten that God has made us equal but you have, especially in your unequal treatment of LGBT Russians.  That's why millions of people around the world are protesting your anti-gay laws and policies.  We watch the videos of gay activists being arrested, beaten...and worse.  You can lecture the world all you want on human rights, Mr. Putin, but you don't walk your talk.  You are an anti-democratic autocrat, not a great man of peace and humanist values.  

Mr. Putin, what makes America exceptional is that this country constantly talks about its problems and shortcomings in open and messy way, including those of its leaders.  We are working toward creating a more perfect union everyday, inspired by the great ideas embodied in the U.S. Constitution.  We have our problems and share of hypocrisy, but we are open about these things and are working on it. 

Nancy Pelosi is on the same page as me, listen to her: 

Russians demand more democracy through protests

Watch As Protests Spread, Putin Faces Potential Competition for Presidency on PBS. See more from PBS NEWSHOUR.

Nicholas Kristof checks in on Egypt's democracy & offers differing perspectives about that country's future

Syrian democracy protesters keep it up...

Andrew Sullivan writes eloquently on the extremism of today's GOP and his hopes for a new, Huntsman-style direction for the party. Hear, hear!

"Republicanism As Religion" by Andrew Sullivan

The Dish covered the remarkable web essay of Mike Lofgren, but I didn't comment myself because it so closely follows my own argument in "The Conservative Soul" and on this blog, that it felt somewhat superfluous. But I want to draw attention to the crux of the piece, because if we are to understand how the right became so unmoored from prudence, moderation and tradition and became so infatuated with recklessness, extremism and revolution, we need to understand how it happened.

It is, of course, as my shrink never fails to point out, multi-determined. But here is Lofgren's attempt at a Rosebud:

How did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs - economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism - come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower Republicanism?

It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets.

That too is my view: that the GOP, deep down, is behaving as a religious movement, not as a political party, and a radical religious movement at that. Lofgren sees the "Prosperity Gospel" as a divine blessing for personal enrichment and minimal taxation (yes, that kind of Gospel is compatible with Rand, just not compatible with the actual Gospels); for military power (with a major emphasis on the punitive, interventionist God of the Old Testament); and for radical change and contempt for existing institutions (as a product of End-Times thinking, intensified after 9/11).

Lofgren argues that supply-side economics attaches to the fundamentalist worldview purely by coalition necessity. The fundamentalists are not that interested in debt or economics (they sure didn't give a damn as spending exploded under Bush) but if their coalition partners insist on a certain economic doctrine, they'll easily go along with it, as long as it is never compromised. If it's presented as eternal dogma, they can handle it - and defend it with gusto. If it also means that Obama is wrong, so much the better. Most theo-political movements need an anti-Christ of some sort; and Obama - even though he is the most demonstrably Christian president since Carter - fills the role.

And so this political deadlock conceals a religious war at its heart. Why after all should one abandon or compromise sacred truths? And for those whose Christianity can only be sustained by denial of modern complexity, of scientific knowledge, and of what scholarly studies of the Bible's origins have revealed, this fusion of political and spiritual lives into one seamless sensibility and culture, is irresistible. And public reminders of modernity - that, say, many Americans do not celebrate Christmas, that gay people have human needs, that America will soon be a majority-minority country and China will overtake the US in GDP by mid-century - are terribly threatening.

But all these nuances do not therefore vanish. The gays don't disappear. China keeps growing. The population becomes browner and browner. Women's lives increasingly become individual choices not social fates. And this enrages and terrifies the fundamentalist even more. Hence the occasional physical lashing out - think Breivik or McVeigh - but more profoundly, the constant endless insatiable cultural lashing out at the "elites" who have left fundamentalism behind, and have, on many core issues, science on their side. So within this religious core, and fundamentalist mindset, you also have the steely solder of ressentiment, intensified even further by a period of white middle and working class decline and economic crisis.

That's how I explain the current GOP. It can only think in doctrines, because the alternative is living in a complicated, global, modern world they both do not understand and also despise. Taxes are therefore always bad. Government is never good. Foreign enemies must be pre-emptively attacked. Islam is not a religion. Climate change is an elite conspiracy to impoverish America. Terror suspects are terrorists. When Americans torture, it is not torture. When Christians murder, they are not Christians. And if you change your mind on any of these issues, you are a liberal, an apostate, and will be attacked.

If your view of conservatism is one rooted in an instinctual, but agile, defense of tradition, in a belief in practical wisdom that alters constantly with circumstance, in moderation and the defense of the middle class as the stabilizing ballast of democracy, in limited but strong government ... then the GOP is no longer your party (or mine).

Religion has replaced all of this, reordered it, and imbued the entire political-economic-religious package with zeal. And the zealous never compromise. They don't even listen.

Think of Michele Bachmann's wide-eyed, Stepford stare as she waits for a questioner to finish before providing another pre-cooked doctrinal nugget. My fear - and it has building for a decade and a half, because I've seen this movement up-close from within and also on the front lines of the marriage wars - is that once one party becomes a church with unchangeable doctrines, and once it has supplanted respect for institutions and civility with the radical pursuit of timeless doctrines and hatred of governing institutions, then our democracy is in grave danger.

If you ask why I remain such a strong Obama supporter, it is because I see him as that rare individual able to withstand the zeal without becoming a zealot in response, and to overcome the recklessness of pure religious ideology with pragmatism, civility and reason. That's why they fear and loathe him. Not because his policies are not theirs'. But because his temperament is their nemesis. If he defeats them next year, they will break, because their beliefs are so brittle, but will then reform, along Huntsman-style lines. If they defeat him, I fear we will no longer be participating in a civil conversation, however fraught, but in a civil war.

The brave Syrian people won't give up their mostly peaceful quest for democracy despite being murdered by government troops

Man's innate desire for freedom: the latest from Syria

Alliance of shame: Iran advises Syria on how best to suppress & murder pro-democracy protesters

From the Wall Street Journal last month, the extremely religious and murderous regime in Iran is advising the very secular and extremely murderous regime in Syria. Read about it here.

What sort of governments shoot and kill their own people? The answer: immoral ones who are desperate to maintain their power and privilege!

This is the triumph of democracy over terrorism; the ideals of Obama over Osama's; love over fear

As a follower of the Buddhist way, I can not garner joy from the death of anyone even people who do things as evil as Osama or Hitler. It is just not in me.

On this occasion, I celebrate life and, in this case, the triumph of democracy over terrorism on two levels. First, President Obama kept his eye on the prize in going after Osama where the Bush administration long had lost its way, constantly changed the reasons for starting the Iraq War. Sometimes, Obama may be too cautious in his approaches to problems, but overall he is well-informed and takes educated gambles with his power. I respect this.

Second, the widespread embrace of the democracy movement in the Middle East, starting with Iran in 2009, shows the innate urge of people wanting to be free and govern themselves, create a better lives for themselves and their families, and say no to corruption and the abuse of civil liberties. President Obama talked about this in his famous Cairo speech. People are willing to sacrifice their lives for this movement of love, standing before tanks and marching. The idea of democracy is life-affirming and it trumps Osama's model of terrorism and fear, anyday. The power of human rights, in the broadest sense.

For this I am grateful.

Roger Cohen on removing Qadaffi: "Be ruthless" & then let the messy process of building a democracy begin

...Who are the Libyan rebels? Who are the angry of Latakia? The Arab transitions will be long and bumpy — like those that brought representative government to Latin America and Central Europe and wide swathes of Asia — but now that fear has been overcome, they are irreversible.

Here’s who the protesters are: people like Asmaa Mahfouz, 26, the Egyptian woman who on Jan. 18 made a video urging citizens to go to Tahrir Square on Jan. 25 — the demonstration that would start the revolution. She said then: “We’ll go down and demand our rights, our fundamental human rights. I won’t even talk about any political rights. We just want our human rights and nothing else.” And she said people “don’t have to come to Tahrir Square, just go down anywhere and say it, that we are free human beings.” And: “This is enough!”

People are being born throughout the Middle East. They are discovering their capacity to change things, their inner “Basta!” That’s how the Arab spring began on Dec. 17 in the little town of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia — with a fruit peddler’s “enough” to humiliation. In my end is my beginning.

Three months later the genie is not only out of the bottle, it’s shattered the bottle. I said of Libya in an earlier column: Be ruthless or stay out. So now the West is in, be ruthless. Arm the resurgent rebels. Incapacitate Qaddafi. Do everything short of putting troops on the ground. Qaddafi, as President Obama has said, “must leave.” So that Libya can be an Arab country that is imperfect but open.

--Roger Cohen in today's NYTimes

"To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and...our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different."

Amen! This speech is what Obama promised when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. He promised to use American power when our strategic interests and values are under attack, not in every country, but selectively and with clear-sighted pragmatism. This is just another why I love my President.

The International Community is helping the people of Libya get rid of their cold-blooded killer & dictator

I am reading that some political observers are worried that Obama will invade Syria if the people there revolt against the government. I doubt it strongly: Obama is averse to wars and invasions, and the last thing he wants to do is get bogged down in an internecine conflict in Syria, which has many religious sects, political rivalries, and ethnic tensions. One Afghanistan is enough...or more accurately, too many.

Photographer John Moore covers the Arab uprisings

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

The democracy movement even touches Syria

Mo Nabbous, the courageous and patriotic man who created the uncensored Libya al Hurra ("freedom") Livestream news channel, is killed by a sniper's bullet

Read about the tragic death of this pioneering Libyan citizen journalist, a true fighter for freedom and democracy.

Remembering those brave Libyans who are fighting tyranny and tanks with stones

Today, the Iranian government jailed Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former presidential candidate and opposition leader, for advocating democracy

With the call for freedom and democracy sweeping the Middle East, the Iranian government is running scared and today ordered the immediate imprisonment of Mousavi and his wife, without trial. The above video shows the street support for Mousavi in June 2009.

While the Iranian theocracy try to suppress its people through fear and murder, in the long run, Iranians are eventually going to rise up and throw off the shackles of control. Just as the Libyans are doing right now.

My heart is with these people, including their LGBT ones who carry the additional burden of fighting ignorance, bigotry, and prejudice.

A poem honoring freedom fighters

“A Free Man” by Rosalie Hickler, from The Atlantic in 1928:

Pressed sorely on all sides, but loath to yield,
Sometimes when it has seemed that I must die
I see your banner, sharp against the sky,
And catch the glitter of your battered shield.
Then, spite of weariness, my arm is steeled
To lift my own discouraged banner high
And gather laughter for a battle cry
To fling against the fiercely crowding field.

I know what friendless struggles you incur,
Faring so carelessly in ways apart,
Still smiling to yourself, unconquered still,
Wielding the lightning blade Excalibur,
Your fair white plume unstained, O Gallant Heart,
Armored in triple mail from every ill.

via the Daily Dish

This is what freedom feels like to Libyans

Libyans continue to protest despite the violence