Imagine Vladimir Putin admitted on camera to telling President Nieto of Mexico “fire your state prosecutor or you don’t get the loan we promised you.” Imagine he joked about this overt interference in another sovereign country, imagine he revelled in it as a sign of his country’s power and supremacy. What would the mainstream media headlines be? How many times would the clip be played on CNN, the BBC and Sky News? How many people in the world would not be aware he had said these words? Proof at last that Russia is meddling in the affairs of other nations. Well, how many of those news outlets played this on a loop for their viewers? [starts at 51m]

Here’s the transcript:

BIDEN: I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t…. I said, nah…we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.

You see it wasn’t Vladmir Putin, it was Joe Biden, former vice-President of the United States, at the Council for Foreign Relations, bragging about how he put the squeeze on the Yatseniuk/Poroshenko government – 5,000 miles from his country’s borders.

With that glassy-eyed obliviousness to irony achieved only by the terminally stupid and entitled Biden said these words at a public discussion of an article he co-authored called “How to Stand Up to the Kremlin: Defending Democracy Against Its Enemies.” And if you think this isn’t breathtakingly hypocritical enough, his fellow author Michael Carpenter had earlier had this to say about the alleged problem with Russia:

CARPENTER: So I think Russia has three principal goals. One is to weaken Western democracies internally. Another one, as the vice president said, is to divide the countries of NATO and the EU internally, to deal individually with those nations, as opposed to with a united front. And then third is to undermine the rules-based international order, which, from Moscow’s perspective, is slanted in favor of the United States because it promotes norms of democracy, because it promotes certain other norms in the international sphere—territorial integrity, sovereignty—that Russia sometimes feels it can transgress when it wants to.

Just to re-connect with reality at this point – the US is currently illegally occupying part of Syria. It has launched four flagrantly illegal wars since 2001. And, to top off the Double Think, a man in the same room as Carpenter – during this very discussion – openly and gleefully admitted to illegally blackmailing a foreign government – to laughter and applause from his audience.

They listen to Mr C talk about the “rules-based international order” as if the history of US rule-breaking didn’t exist. They don’t have a qualm about Russia being sanctioned and squeezed and threatened over mere suspicion of doing what Biden gleefully boasts about.

Another day in the Empire of Double Standards and Moral Relativism.