Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Elliott Abrams: The Soviet Standard Returns

“It’s important to look at human rights more broadly than it has been defined. Human rights are also the right to a good job and shelter over your head and a chance to send your kids to school and get health care when your wife is pregnant. It’s a much broader agenda. Too often it has gotten narrowed to our detriment.”

No one would be surprised to hear that such words were spoken by Mikhail Suslov, the long-time ideological chief of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, or by Khrushchev or Brezhnev, or by Castro or Ceaucescu, or by any other chieftain from the “socialist countries.” But that quote actually comes from Secretary of State Clinton, in an interview this month with the Wall Street Journal. It is an astonishing revival of the old Soviet line, now taken up by an American official.


In case Mrs. Clinton has fallen for the line that promoting human rights is a George Bush–Ronald Reagan right-wing conspiracy, a few words from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural may be in order. When Kennedy asserted that we were “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world,” he quickly added that we would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” 

Not a “good job,” not “shelter,” and not “health care when your wife is pregnant.” Democrats used to be for liberty too.

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

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