Political WTF Moment: Fox News Sunday

It’s time now for a new feature on GC&F, where we focus on political discourse in the media. This political WTF moment comes to us from yesterday’s Fox New Sunday. On the show, Fox’s Chris Wallace talked to William Shulz, Amnesty International’s US Executive Director, about Amnesty’s recent report on detainee treatment at Guantanamo Bay. Feel free to read the entire exchange; you may get the distinct impression that Mr. Wallace didn’t care for the report. If you’re short on time, though, just read this particularly amusing question, and Shulz’s thoughtful answer:

WALLACE: Mr. Schulz, if I may ask you, when you accuse the Bush administration of, in using your words, "atrocious human rights violations," where do you fit into that equation the liberation of 50 million people from oppressive regimes?

SCHULZ: These are two entirely different questions. You know, someone can do a good thing one day and a bad thing the other and it doesn't vitiate the bad thing that they have done good things as well. That is not the point. Amnesty tries to hold one plumb-line universal standard to every government: to Chile, to Cuba, to North Korea, to China -- every government. And the United States applauds Amnesty when we criticize Cuba and North Korea and China. Indeed, that's Secretary Rumsfeld, who just called us reprehensible. That is the same person who quoted Amnesty regularly in the run-up to the Iraq war when we reported for 20 years on Saddam Hussein's violations -- years during which Rumsfeld himself was courting Hussein for the U.S. government.