[scottLobster]

How to start? Go back a couple of centuries. Americans reconciling the American mythology with the actions of the American people/government is one of our unspoken national pastimes going back at least to Manifest Destiny in the 19th century.

But on that note I think "every kind of basic human right" is a bit extreme. We have arguably the strongest free speech protections in the world, people are free to move around as they see fit, we're a pretty great place to start a business as we're a massive single market that speaks the same language with relatively lax regulations and low corruption, our higher education is second to none, and most recently we just allowed gay marriage.

Granted some things need a serious overhaul, but while we get a lot wrong we also get a lot right.

And frankly you'll be hard-pressed to find a government that doesn't try to abuse its people when it's convenient. That just a function of power-hungry people typically being assholes. The difference is the US is the world superpower and we wave the flag a lot, not to mention we're just a massive, diverse country. So our hypocrisy is orders of magnitude greater just by virtue of scale, and then on top of that we're held to a higher standard by everybody else.

If you took the government of, say Norway (or some other government that you feel best respects human rights), gave them the size and diversity of the US, and then scaled them up to World Superpower status and gave them some cultural tweaks to actually be able to maintain that status, I think you'd see just as much hypocrisy.