Doubletalk on Darfur

Everyone knows that the George W. Bush administration excels at doubletalk and all manner of hypocritical posturing. That's what keeps the left-wing blogs alive. But a post today at Watching the Watchers provides one of the best examples I've seen of the art of doubletalk as practiced by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice:

QUESTION: Dr. Rice, why should citizens of Sudan, which I believe is not a
signatory to the Rome statute, be subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC
[International Criminal Court], when you argue that American citizens should not
be subject to it precisely because the United States is not party to the treaty?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, we do believe that as a matter of principle it is
important to uphold the principle that non-parties to a treaty are indeed
non-parties to a treaty. Sudan is an extraordinary circumstance. I believe that
it was Secretary Powell who talked about the fact that we believe a genocide is
being committed in Sudan. Whatever you want to call it, there are clearly crimes
against humanity being committed in Sudan and there are people who have to be
held accountable for those crimes.

I would note that this comes through Security Council resolution, which does
give some protection, I think, to non-parties to the treaty. But Sudan is an
extraordinary circumstance. I would like to just note that we have also achieved
for—through the Security Council the passage of a peacekeeping resolution so
that we can get peace keepers on the ground to reinforce the North-South
agreement that was concluded at Naivasha and we believe that that North-South
agreement will be an important part of helping to resolve the Darfur
difficulty.
It is also the case that we have a sanctions resolution that has
just passed and we will be able to employ those tools. But the international
community has to act on Darfur. It has to act with great speed. It is a
humanitarian crisis, it is a moral crisis, and it is a crisis that is
extraordinary in its scope and in its potential for even greater damage to those
populations. So I think this is a different situation, frankly.

Read the whole post. The genocide in Darfur is one of those stories that is too "boring" for the MSM to cover when we have Terri Schiavo, John Paul II and other dead bodies to gaze at. But it's time for the rest of us to refocus on that boring thing called the state of the world.