Actual Headline (and Magna Carta for Sale!)

Bush astounds activists, supports human rights. No, really—look:


Damn, you gotta love McClatchy.

The thing is, it's a totally fair headline. Bush quite genuinely did stun human rights activists by standing in front of the UN yesterday and delivering a speech in which he implored the UN to "recommit itself to restoring human decency," without a trace of irony or the merest glimpse of self-awareness.

Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, the president called for renewed efforts to enforce the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a striking point of emphasis for a leader who's widely accused of violating human rights in waging war against terrorism.

Bush didn't mention the U.S. prisons in Afghanistan or at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. practice of holding detainees for years without legal charges or access to lawyers, or the CIA's "rendition" kidnappings of suspects abroad, all issues of concern to human rights activists around the world.

"At first read, it's little more than an exercise in hypocrisy. His words about human rights ring hollow because his credibility is nonexistent," said Curt Goering, the deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA. "The gap between the rhetoric and the actual record is stunning. I can't help but believe many people in the audience were thinking, 'What was this man thinking?' "

…"I believe the president should be championing human rights at the U.N., but he's lost his authority and credibility as a world leader because of his policies on rendition and Guantanamo," said Tom Malinowski, the advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "His remarks would be more effective if the U.S. was practicing what it's preaching."
That pretty much sums it up.

Meanwhile, speaking of human rights and jettisoning habeas corpus, former US presidential candidate and zany wee nutbag H. Ross Perot has put up for sale his own personal 13th-century copy of the Magna Carta. He had loaned it to the National Archives for display, but instead of permanently donating it, which is something lots of billionaires tend to do with valuable artifacts, he's just gonna auction it off to the highest bidder. Which seems somehow appropriate in the good old US of A these days.

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