I genuinely believe Condoleezza Rice has no idea why so many of us would find this ironic.

The Russian government under Vladimir Putin has amassed so much central authority that the power-grab may undermine Moscow's commitment to democracy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday.

"In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development," Rice told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.

"I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma," said Rice, referring to the Russian parliament.

According to the AP report, Rice also told the human-rights activists that democratic institutions are the keys to combating arbitrary power from the state.

On a more serious point, McClatchy's Jonathan Landay has a report on how the Bush administration's policy towards Russia has been ineffective and based on faulty assumptions from the outset.

The piece quotes Michael McFaul of Stanford University's Hoover Institution, hardly a progressive outlet, explaining that Bush and his foreign policy team "grossly misjudged Putin," considering him "a good guy and one of us."