Hillary Clinton, duplicitous as ever, has betrayed her own crusade as First Lady against human rights abuses in China. What little respect I had for her has evaporated. Here’s the excerpt from CNN:

“The United States will continue to press China on issues such as Tibet, Taiwan and human rights, Clinton told reporters accompanying her. ‘But our pressing on those issues can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises,’ she said.”

What about the “global human rights crisis”? What a stupid woman. This is what this is like: Imagine there’s a guy in your neighborhood who has killed his past wives and several of his own children and, while he might shower a select few of his family with privileges and wealth (while leaving others to fend for themselves) he also routinely severely beats his surviving children and current wife.

This guy is China. We are his neighbor and we’ve known him for a long time. We used to have beef with this guy but now no more, ever since he lent us his lawn mower which, incidentally, is worth about $ 681, 900,000,000 (the sum of the U.S. securities China holds). Now, unfortunately, we kind of had a drunken, coke-fueled rampage with/on this lawnmower. We severely messed it up. It’s a long story.

For all sorts of reasons, we need China’s help to fix it. For one thing, we need that lawnmower and so does China. China’s not pissed though. China’s still cool. You pay later.

But, according to Hillary Clinton, bringing up the whole wife and children killing thing would piss off our friend China so much that he might just not help us at all, even though it’s his lawn mower. More than that, there are some dudes after us trying to kill us and we need to be on good terms with China because he’s the only one who can tell these thugs (i.e. North Korea) to back off. He knows them. And then there’s all our trash in his yard and clouds of poisons in the air above our neighborhood coming from his chimney, and we mean to talk to him about but don’t because we’re lazy.

And what’s the worst part about our failure to report all these murders to the proper authorities: we’re the Chief of Police!

But enough of this analogy. The problem with putting off human rights in China until we’ve cleared up the economic, climate, and security crises is that these crises will never get solved. A) “security crisis”—what does that even mean? B) “economic crisis”—shut your mouth, Clinton. Let’s just let the Chinese torture more pregnant Falun Gong members by starving them to death in order to make things less awkward when we want to start putting up protectionist barriers to Chinese goods.

The reality is that the Chinese want the U.S. to start buying its exports again so that rising unemployment in their country doesn’t threaten to destabilize the regime. And, you know, because they want money. Furthermore, I assure you that what the Chinese’ll do the next time we bring up their depraved human rights record is do what they’ve always done and ignore us.

This was going to happen anyway. I just don’t understand why Clinton had to be such a giant idiot and say it out loud. All she managed to do was discourage the heroic efforts of thousands of Chinese human rights activists and the Chinese governments victims.

Now, they know that America, a country they might consider one of the more powerful champions of their cause, will casually and proudly announce that it’s turning its back on them.

And, finally, C) Someone should tell Madame Secretary that we’ll be dealing with the “global glimate change crisis” for the rest of her life and pretty much for the rest of human history on this planet. If we’re going to put off human rights in China until this crisis gets solved, then we might as well just say we don’t care and give up.

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