Pot, Kettle.

The United States is being, rightfully, criticized by many other countries regarding the State Department's recent annual report on human rights.

"Unfortunately, [the report] once again gives us reason to say that double standards are a characteristic of the American approach to such an important theme," the Russian Foreign Ministry declared after reviewing the report. "Characteristically off-screen is the ambiguous record of the United States itself."
-snip-
Amnesty International, the human rights organization, noted that the Bush administration has turned over prisoners arrested in the battle against terrorism to some of the countries it cites in the report for torturing prisoners. Human rights activists long have charged that U.S. intelligence officers resorted to this practice, known as rendition, as a way to avoid U.S. restrictions prohibiting the torture of prisoners by allowing foreign agents to do so.

(emphasis mine)

And hey, speaking of our reputation in the international community, Bob Harris has a nice metaphor (blatantly copying the entire entry:

New website I'm starting to like a lot: WatchingAmerica.com. It's a Buzzflash-like roundup of headlines, but collected from media sources all over the world.

To those of you not yet in the habit of reading the news as it's written overseas, the selections might seem biased, or even bluntly anti-American. Which, um, is the thing. After reading local papers during my own recent bounces around the planet, I can't say this is particularly unrepresentative.

In any case, if you're interested, the bottom of the front page also provides a ton of links to the home pages of media from across the planet, so you can easily do your own digging and think for yourself. Bush really has alienated vast swaths of humanity, and the only place that isn't screamingly obvious is within these very borders.

It's a bit like having to live in an alcoholic household, really. Inside the house, Dad's really a good guy who just needs us to love him a little more and work a little harder and meanwhile the "good" kids are the ones enabling him and the ones who actually see that he's just a selfish f***ing drunk are very, very bad.

I suppose this puts people like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh in the enabling-mother role, unable to see the faults in the man they love, no matter how obvious, and willing to lash out at anyone who asks why he's picking fights, not taking care of the house, and running up enormous debts.

Seems about right.

WatchingAmerica.com just makes it a little easier to go over to the neighbor's house and see what our kitchen screaming matches sound like from across the street.