WASHINGTON INSIGHT

COMPARING ABUSES: As China’s abysmal record on human rights flares anew as an issue, Sen. Dianne Feinstein is trotting out an old and unconventional idea. In a week when State Department officials said China has had more success eliminating dissent than post-Stalinist Russia, the California Democrat gave a speech to the Asia Society in which she proposed that U.S. and Chinese leaders appoint a commission to chart “the evolution of human rights in both countries over the last 20 to 30 years.” That idea has been advanced from time to time by officials searching for a way to keep from antagonizing China and to provide cover for the United States to continue granting trade benefits to a nation whose human rights record it deplores. But the California Democrat didn’t stop there. The commission, she said, “would point out the success and failures--both Tiananmen Square and Kent State.” The remark struck some human rights advocates as absurd, given that Chinese military troops massacred many hundreds of demonstrators in a planned assault in 1989, while at Kent State University in 1970, Ohio national guard troops opened fire briefly and without government authority in a confrontation with antiwar demonstrators, killing four.

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UNWITTING ALLY: Dick Morris, whose new book “Behind the Oval Office” reveals how he charted President Clinton’s course to reelection in 1996, has a typically unorthodox slant on Vice President Al Gore’s anticipated presidential candidacy in the year 2000. Although most people consider Democratic House leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri the chief obstacle to Gore’s march to the Democratic nomination, Morris sees Gephardt as the key to Gore’s success. “Gephardt will loom on the horizon as Gore’s chief rival for so long that nobody else will dare get into the race,” Morris predicts. “But in the final analysis Gephardt will decide he won’t risk his chance to become speaker of the House by running for the presidency, so Gore will coast home.” If Gephardt does retreat from the 2000 presidential campaign, it won’t be the first time. After his unsuccessful candidacy for the 1988 race, he turned a deaf ear to the pleas of his admirers that he run in 1992 and 1996.

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ALL GREEK: Working up to a fine sense of outrage this week, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns accused former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic of violating the Bosnia peace accord by giving an interview to a Greek newspaper. Karadzic, indicted for war crimes by the international tribunal in The Hague, agreed last July to drop out of public life. “Mr. Karadzic stepped over the line today,” Burns said. “His statements are outrageous.” Just to review: Karadzic is accused of ordering the murder of thousands of civilians during the Bosnian war. And now he has--gasp--talked to a newspaper.