It’s rather telling when the U.S. can’t even win an argument regarding moral behavior with Venezuela.

I would say that this guy has a point.

Rice hit out at the shuttering of Radio Caracas Television, RCTV, calling it Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez's "sharpest and most acute" move yet against democracy.

Venezuela's top diplomat, Nicolas Maduro, then accused her of hypocrisy, unacceptable meddling in his nation's affairs and compared the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and secret prisons elsewhere to something not seen since "the time of Hitler."

Maduro defended the decision to close RCTV as "democratic, legal and fair" and accused the United States of repeated violations of human rights, including at the U.S.-Mexico border where immigrants "are chased and hunted like animals" and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he said terrorism suspects are being "held hostage."

I am certainly not going to defend Venezuela or anything that Hugo Chavez does on the international stage. (I do understand that he might have some rather good enlightened domestic policies, but I am not going there.) And I would add that Mr. Maduro might want to go study some post-WWII history, as the Soviet Union ran some pretty damn big secret and not-so-secret prisons during the 50’s to the 70’s. Compared to the Gulags the Soviets ran, I would say that Guantanamo and our “outsourcing” of “enhanced interrogation techniques” to other countries not bound by civility and legal traditions, however horrible they are considering we are supposed to be an enlightened and compassionate country, are still pretty small potatoes compared to those.

However, here’s the whole deal with the United States trying to defend torturing suspects who have not been charged with anything, aren’t allowed access to lawyers or the legal system, lying about pretty much everything that the government has done with regard to the Iraq war, including outing a valuable CIA asset for political revenge, etc. In other words, we are trying to defend the indefensible. Guess what? We no longer hold the moral high road in any of these discussions! No one believes us! We are shown to be bullies and hypocrites!

We have lost our moral standing in the world, and can’t even win a pissing match against a third world despot. That’s how low the Bush Administration has brought this country.