situation room hillary Jeffrey Goldberg has a long piece on US
Middle East policy in the midst of the "Arab Spring."  He
interviewed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at length on the
subject.  But what jumped out at Goldberg (and us) were her
remarks about the Chinese government.  In the diplomatic world,
language is employed to obfuscate and obscure, for obvious
reasons.  You never know what an ill-chosen word might lead to.
Mrs. Clinton's remarks to Goldberg regarding the Chinese regime
were (and are) undiplomatically blunt.  They were made in the
context of China being afraid of events in the Middle East. 
Goldberg reports:  It was during this part of the conversation,
when the subject of China, and its frightened reaction to the
Arab Spring, came up, that she took an almost Reaganesque turn,
calling into question not just Beijing's dismal human rights
record, but the future of the Chinese regime itself. The Obama
administration has been ratcheting up the rhetoric on China's
human rights record lately,