State Dept. Official Compares Democrats to Beleaguered Russian Opposition

In what may be the most bizarre Freudian slip from a Bush flunky to date, Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, compared the Democratic Party to the persecuted, spied upon, and frequently arrested democratic opposition in Russia. Dismissing Vladimir Putin's warnings to western diplomats to not attend a conference of opposition activists held July 11 in Moscow (at which several were arrested), Fried quipped that,

for instance, that if Russian diplomats in the United States wanted to attend a conference organized by the Democratic Party, "we wouldn’t regard it as anything other than just doing their job."

Fried also said of Putin's Russia, which routinely imprisons political opponents, ruthlessly controls all major media, and centralizes wealth and industrial power among Kremlin loyalists, that "[t]his isn't a totalitarian country." Hmmm... Which political dictionary are you using, Daniel?