Dick Cheney, of all people, is now the administration's democracy and human rights czar? Yesterday Cheney put the smackdown on ever-more-authoritarian Russia: "In many areas of civil society — from religion and the news media, to advocacy groups and political parties — the government has unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of her people."

The increasing authoritarianism of the Putin government is indeed depressing, and a tragic period in Russian history. But the current spat is pretty obviously not about democracy and human rights, as any cursory search for similar condemnations by Cheney of, say, the Saudi Arabian or Kazakh governments makes clear. It's about Iran. Russia has refused to stop selling the Iranians nuclear technology or to support US demands for UN-imposed sanctions to punish Iranian noncompliance with the IAEA. Cheney's speech is transparent retaliation for Russian non-cooperation on Iran.

On a broader note, this may be the clearest elucidation yet that all mushmouthing by the Bush administration over spreading freedom throughout the world is so much cynical cant. The Administration uses democracy and human-rights issues as tools to reward or punish countries for cooperating with or opposing US foreign policy. They're just propaganda points. If you go along with the GWOT, you can throw your political opponents in jail and name the month of April after yourself, should you so desire, with nary a peep from Bushco. If you buck us on GWOT, though, woe be unto you for suspiciously auditing the taxes of the local branch of Greenpeace!

And this, of course, is what Bush meant in that foreign-policy state-of-the-union address a couple years back, when he said that the US's ideals and its interests were now one. He meant that from now on, our ideals - freedom, human rights, and democracy - would become propaganda tools which we cynically and selectively deploy in the pursuit of our interests.

Pam Anderson's op-ed in the WSJ on why we should stop using chimps as movie performers is actually pretty great. A lot of people disdain PETA on the grounds that with all the man-on-man (and girl-on-girl) cruelty these days, anyone who's worried about man-on-dog cruelty is just a fluffhead. This is kind of a silly objection, really. It's not as though this is a zero-sum game, where torturing more animals is likely to lead to less human suffering. Obviously, societies that are cruel to animals are cruel to people, too, and societies that are kind to animals are more likely to be kind to people. The relationship isn't one-to-one -- there's certainly plenty of human suffering in vegetarian parts of India -- but it's certainly broadly correlated: the antislavery, human rights and women's rights movements can be traced from their births in Georgian and Victorian England right along with societies for prevention of cruelty to animals. People who are for ethical treatment, in general, should have only encouragement and fellow-feeling for those who concentrate on the ethical treatment of animals in particular.