With police departments across this country violating the fundamental rights of Occupy Wall Street protesters and brutalizing peaceful activists, we have this statement emerging from the Obama administration:

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that the United States supported the right to peaceful protest in Russia as it does “anywhere in the world.” “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,” she said. “So our expectation is that if there are protests, that they will be peaceful and that they will be allowed to proceed peacefully,” Nuland said.

The above statement is reverberating in my unsettled head as I simultaneously read about Occupy Boston's early-morning eviction and recall images such as this:



and this:

and this:

My only explanation for the administration's expressed concerns about the fate of protesters in Russia, and its simultaneous reticence to express similar concerns about those protesting in the U.S., is that the Obama administration is playing a joke. It's making a funny. It's trying to parody itself.

Because otherwise, I have no words.

None.

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