Anti-Climacus

LINK: I certainly hope that this is intended as a postivist statement and not a normative one:

"Regardless of U.S. intentions, the view reflected in Shujaat's cartoon eye is one that is widely held. The U.S. is not in a position to lecture other nations about human rights violations."

You could criticize this with the old Hitchens view that past moral failures only obligate current actions more, or with the view that it's because no one raises the salience of human rights issues that they never get dealt with (so the very act of bringing them up is the first step toward actually making progress with respect to them), or else the Christian view that we are all, of course, imperfect and led to fall short of where we ought to be, but our obligations don't index at all to our success or failure to act on them.