It's Hope & Change - just not for those oppressed by tyranny

Charles Hurt

D.C. BUREAU CHIEF

WASHINGTON -- Hope and Change, it turns out, is all relative.

They are a sweet elixir when you are talking about electing as president a smooth-talking street organizer with a fistful of vague promises and no governing experience.

But Hope and Change become a noxious gas when you are talking about a popular uprising by freedom fighters shaking loose the iron grip of a 30-year dictatorship.

At least that is how President Obama sees it.

From the moment he took office, Obama has misread the situation in Egypt and sided with the convenience of tyranny over the untidiness of freedom.

Choosing tyranny is easier to do when it is not your skull being fractured by a police baton.

Obama says he has repeatedly urged Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to reform, but those words are no match for the cover the Obama administration has offered the Mubarak regime.

Just three months into the new administration, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Egypt and was asked whether Mubarak's well-documented and violent disregard for human rights made him unwelcome at the White House.

"It is not in any way connected," she replied. "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States."

Obama completed the thaw of relations when he chose Cairo as the spot where he would deliver his buttery speech begging to start over America's relationship with the Muslim world.

In that speech, Obama lamented the "offensive sexuality and mindless violence" that the Internet brings into the home.

But he failed to mention how the Internet is a far more powerful force as an irrepressible spark of freedom for those who have access to it. That, of course, is why one of Mubarak's first acts to quell riots has been to kill access to the Internet so rioters cannot communicate.

The central promise of Obama's speech in Cairo was that he wanted to start over with a new kind of relationship between America and Muslims.

Apparently, this new relationship still includes siding with odious dictators we deem to be less bad over those who cry for freedom.

It is this very kind of unprincipled duplicity that is the root of so much Muslim hatred toward America.

Remember our old best friend, Osama bin Laden, who was our great ally when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan?

Or our other best friend, Saddam Hussein, back during the Iran-Iraq War?

Those friendships did not exactly end well and certainly have not made for very good relations with the Muslim world.

The Obama administration sealed its affection for Mubarak and his thuggery this week when Vice President Joe Biden took sides in the burning rebellion and said Mubarak is not a dictator and should not step down as protesters are demanding.

A simple question can tell you if someone believes that the freedom is a God-granted right.

Do you believe in Justice over Order or Order over Justice?

As a candidate running for president, Obama believed in Justice over Order.

Today -- for Egyptians, anyway -- he believes in Order over Justice. It is a sad mockery of the fundamental underpinnings of our democracy.

This administration has turned off America's beacon to the world for freedom and left darkness in which dictators do what they want.

churt@nypost.com