Hypocrisy at its worst: the Obama administration is calling on Russia to allow peaceful protests and not permit the police to deny the rights of those who want to take to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with the way things went down with the recent election in the former “evil empire.” 

"We have seen that hundreds were arrested, and there is apparently a prominent blogger who remains in detention," Mark Toner, deputy spokesperson for the Department of State, said. "We've expressed our concerns about the treatment of all those being arrested who were exercising their rights to peaceful protest."

Victoria Nuland, another State Department spokesperson, put it this way: “We expect that those demonstrations will remain peaceful on behalf of all parties, whether they’re the demonstrators or whether they are those keeping social order. So our expectation is that if there are protests, that they will be peaceful and that they will be allowed to proceed peacefully.” And blah, blah, blah.

Before they stick their noses into other countries, Toner, Nuland and others, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, should be talking about the mistreatment of Occupy Wall Street protesters here throughout the U.S. If they don’t know what’s going on, they should check out the videos on youtube. 

Police in this country have been beating the crap out of peaceful protesters, not to mention pepper spraying young women who were being detained. They even sent a veteran of the Iraqi War to the hospital in critical condition after shooting him with rubber bullets in Oakland. An 84-year-old Seattle grandmother paid the price for exercising her right to freedom of speech and assembly by getting a face full of pepper (it’s not a vegetable) spray.

That the Obama-ites would dare to comment on the situation in other countries without first saying something about what’s going on at home every day of the week is beyond hypocritical. It’s shameful. 

It’s not the first time America the not-so-beautiful has preached one thing and done another when it comes to the right to dissent. 

Even as this country was fighting a cold war against “godless Russia,” supposedly to stop the spread of communism which would wipe out our precious freedoms, among them free speech, police in these United States of America were turning hoses and bulldogs on nonviolent civil rights marchers in the South, and beating up anti-Vietnam War demonstrators on campuses and at the Democratic National Convention. In May 1970, Ohio state troopers shot four students during a peaceful antiwar protest on the campus of Kent State University.

In those days, it was often difficult for those of us in the streets to see the distinction between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

Obama should tend to his own backyard first and foremost and denounce, in no uncertain terms, the abuse of peaceful protesters in this country before he points a finger somewhere else.