DAY OLD BREAD alert: I better publish this mishmash of quotes and links before it goes completely stale. Call it the perspective of a few days, or call it an inability to meet self imposed deadlines. BREAKING I aint. Anyways , here:
IRONY ALERT: Condoleeza Rice went to Russia to meet with human rights activists Saturday OCT 13 and took the opportunity to criticize growing concentration of power in the executive branch. How she did so with a straight face is beyond me.
I think that there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary."
Ah yes the independent judiciary,a cornerstone of a democratic government. Kremlin officials must learn that the executive needs to get permission from the courts in order to spy on citizens. Further, the Kremlin needs to understand that it can not write the law; the executive must fatihfully execute laws passed by the legislature.
What country was she talking about?
"There are questions about the independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma."
Oh yeah, the Duma. She must have been talking about Russia. Rice, to her credit, did underline that her message of checks and balances applies to any country.:
In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development
And what message did the human rights activists have for Rice? Here's Lyudmila Alexeyeva, one of the human right activists Rice met with. She's discussing progress towards increased democracy in the new century:
Starting with 2000, this process was curbed and the country was pushed back toward authoritarianism," Alexeyeva said. "I said that elections became a farce, and we can't replace the authorities even if we wanted to, and that human rights and freedoms were greatly limited."
What's the story with 2000 and farcical elections and the move to authoritarianism? Is this millenium cursed from land to land?
Another Russian human rights activist, Tatyana Lokshina, could not resist stating the obvious:
Considering the Iraq war and the Guantanamo problem and the Abu Ghraib scandal... the Russian side holds out its hands and says look what's happening with you, how can you criticise us?
The unitary executive, signing statements, FISA, you forgot a few Tatyana. The list of executive power grabs under W is inexhaustible. Sure post-Soviet Russia is authoritarian, but they did have their glimmer of glasnost. We still have the same apparatus and many of the same characters we had in the Cold War. Sure we've got healthy democratic institutions and a proud history of forwarding human rights. But at this point does Condoleeza Rice have any standing lecturing other governments about democratic process and human rights? All while extraordinarily renditioning people for extreme interrogation in breakaway former Soviet republics? How did she manage to get herself up to do such a thing?