From (of course) a sports writer trying to do politics (he's going to China to cover the Olympics, and trying to explain why he won't knock China's human rights record):
"China has suffered terrible human losses from two failed Communist Party imperatives of the past, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But we, too, have seen terrible acts committed by our leaders, many with the support of the people: slavery, the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the years of Jim Crow and the epic failure to help the Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans. We all have crosses to bear. Human rights were a big issue when the International Olympic Committee chose Beijing as the site for these Games, but we need to understand, there are different definitions of human rights in different parts of the world."
Please. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were deliberate acts of government policy, which literally killed millions of people--acts for which the Chinese government has never apologized and about which they still won't speak with full openness. Meanwhile, this country fought a war to END slavery; and as for Japanese-Americans detained in World War II, we've both formally apologized AND provided restitution to the families of those kept in the relocation camps during the war.
If you don't want to write about China's human rights record, that's fine--you're a sports writer, not a political journalist. But please don't engage in this strange liberal moral equivalency we see so often, in which our friends on the other side of the aisle try to equate all political sins and suggest that no one can judge anyone or anything else (except liberals--they're always free to judge.)
