"Stingy," "Only the UN counts," and $350 million and counting
Jim Geraghty over at the perpetually-to-be-renamed KerrySpot usefully rounds up the blogosphere's commentary on "Stingygate". And then came Jon Podheretz's broadside today, which is a huge fist-pumper.
Even as that poor bastard Jan Egeland was falling on his butt backpedaling from the UN's latest anti-American slur (He was "misinterpreted," ya know...), a fresh outrage was forthcoming:
The President has announced that the US, Japan, India and Australia would coordinate the world’s response.
But former International Development Secretary Clare Short said that role should be left to the UN.
“I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN when it is the best system we have got and the one that needs building up,” she said.
“Only really the UN can do that job,” she told BBC Radio Four’s PM programme.
“It is the only body that has the moral authority. But it can only do it well if it is backed up by the authority of the great powers.”
There's only two - make it three - possible reactions to such a declaration.
Ed Morrissey chose the first one: incredulous indignation.
Short's anti-American bias shines through in this ludicrous and blatantly stupid assertion. The notion that the UN has any moral authority, let alone be the sole sanctuary of it, should have been universally dismissed in the Oil-For-Food corruption that Kofi Annan has tried to cover up all year. As I recall, that also started as a massive relief fund for victims of the UN's unwillingness to give Saddam the boot instead of starving the Iraqi people to death. The Sole Bastion Of Moral Authority managed to put billions of dollars into Saddam's pockets while enriching the member-states that made sure no one unseated Saddam.
Don't forget the up close and personal outreach in Congo that the Secular Saints Of The Order Of Blue Helmets performed to the women and female children. They spread love - in the form of exploiting the females of almost all ages in exchange for food and water, turning the refugee camps into their personal seraglios and worse.
It's the Clueless Clares of the world who sacrifice the downtrodden of the world to the brutal and incompetent clutches of the UN for the greater purpose of having a single world government. The idea that Short can make this kind of assertion with a straight face shows the depth of corruption on the radical Left. I say bravo to George Bush for bypassing the grifters and rapists of the UN.
That blistering is worthy of lamination and framing, I think. Like, in Kofi Annan's UN office, for however much longer he still has it.
My reaction is one of cynical amusement. This is precisely what I would have expected a UN drone and brain-dead lefty to say. Not only is it morally obtuse, as Cap'n Ed points out, but it's also impenetrably ignorant. As a practical matter, without the United States the United Nation's couldn't tie its own collectiv(ist) shoelaces. As Jonah Goldberg points out in his latest column...
The United States supplies more than one-fifth of the United Nations' total budget (and 57%, 33% and 27% of the budgets for the World Food Program, the Refugee Agency, and Department of Peacekeeping Operations, respectively). We've been the United Nations' biggest donor every year since 1945.
And yet...
[W]henever there's a catastrophe, Uncle Sam is asked to dig deep into his pocket for more money.
Which is redundant:
American citizens, partly thanks to those stingy low taxes, send some $34 billion in private aid around the world every year. That's 10 times the United Nations total budget. America's Christian ministries, private foundations and agencies all do far more in direct charity and aid than the United Nations. But bureaucrats - some who've grown fat on oil-for-food money - measure stinginess in terms of support to the bureaucracy, not to the constituency the bureaucracy was intended to help.
But that's just cash flow; it's in non-cash contributions where the rubber truly meets the road:
America guarantees global stability by keeping the sea lanes open, by preventing North Korea from invading South Korea and China from seizing Taiwan. We did it by preventing Saddam from keeping Kuwait. We ignored the United Nations and intervened to stop genocide in Yugoslavia, and we have 150,000 troops in Iraq working to create a democracy - while the United Nations is still too scared of terrorists, and too anti-American, to help.
In the current crisis, we have now sent the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, a maritime squadron from Guam and an amphibious ship carrying a Marine expeditionary unit to the Indian Ocean to provide assistance in search and rescue and disaster relief.
All of which is to say, in short, that the United Nations is a total and complete fraud as the "world government" that Clare Short deludes herself that it is. It's nothing more than a sandbox for starry-eyed globalists, thieves, murderers, dictators, terrorists, anti-Semites, and America-haters (amongst which is a great deal of overlap).
The Bushies know this. That's why they simply bypassed it and put them in their appropriate place, whining and yapping to be given a seat at the table. And, as at many a family holiday dinner, the President seated them at the equivalent of the card table in the living room, like the puerile internationalist urchins they are.
That's the third response, and perhaps the most poetically just as well.
Meanwhile, our disaster relief outlays continue spiraling upward. Good thing our motives for such generosity are pure, and not directed at kissing ass at Turtle Bay.
Even as that poor bastard Jan Egeland was falling on his butt backpedaling from the UN's latest anti-American slur (He was "misinterpreted," ya know...), a fresh outrage was forthcoming:
The President has announced that the US, Japan, India and Australia would coordinate the world’s response.
But former International Development Secretary Clare Short said that role should be left to the UN.
“I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN when it is the best system we have got and the one that needs building up,” she said.
“Only really the UN can do that job,” she told BBC Radio Four’s PM programme.
“It is the only body that has the moral authority. But it can only do it well if it is backed up by the authority of the great powers.”
There's only two - make it three - possible reactions to such a declaration.
Ed Morrissey chose the first one: incredulous indignation.
Short's anti-American bias shines through in this ludicrous and blatantly stupid assertion. The notion that the UN has any moral authority, let alone be the sole sanctuary of it, should have been universally dismissed in the Oil-For-Food corruption that Kofi Annan has tried to cover up all year. As I recall, that also started as a massive relief fund for victims of the UN's unwillingness to give Saddam the boot instead of starving the Iraqi people to death. The Sole Bastion Of Moral Authority managed to put billions of dollars into Saddam's pockets while enriching the member-states that made sure no one unseated Saddam.
Don't forget the up close and personal outreach in Congo that the Secular Saints Of The Order Of Blue Helmets performed to the women and female children. They spread love - in the form of exploiting the females of almost all ages in exchange for food and water, turning the refugee camps into their personal seraglios and worse.
It's the Clueless Clares of the world who sacrifice the downtrodden of the world to the brutal and incompetent clutches of the UN for the greater purpose of having a single world government. The idea that Short can make this kind of assertion with a straight face shows the depth of corruption on the radical Left. I say bravo to George Bush for bypassing the grifters and rapists of the UN.
That blistering is worthy of lamination and framing, I think. Like, in Kofi Annan's UN office, for however much longer he still has it.
My reaction is one of cynical amusement. This is precisely what I would have expected a UN drone and brain-dead lefty to say. Not only is it morally obtuse, as Cap'n Ed points out, but it's also impenetrably ignorant. As a practical matter, without the United States the United Nation's couldn't tie its own collectiv(ist) shoelaces. As Jonah Goldberg points out in his latest column...
The United States supplies more than one-fifth of the United Nations' total budget (and 57%, 33% and 27% of the budgets for the World Food Program, the Refugee Agency, and Department of Peacekeeping Operations, respectively). We've been the United Nations' biggest donor every year since 1945.
And yet...
[W]henever there's a catastrophe, Uncle Sam is asked to dig deep into his pocket for more money.
Which is redundant:
American citizens, partly thanks to those stingy low taxes, send some $34 billion in private aid around the world every year. That's 10 times the United Nations total budget. America's Christian ministries, private foundations and agencies all do far more in direct charity and aid than the United Nations. But bureaucrats - some who've grown fat on oil-for-food money - measure stinginess in terms of support to the bureaucracy, not to the constituency the bureaucracy was intended to help.
But that's just cash flow; it's in non-cash contributions where the rubber truly meets the road:
America guarantees global stability by keeping the sea lanes open, by preventing North Korea from invading South Korea and China from seizing Taiwan. We did it by preventing Saddam from keeping Kuwait. We ignored the United Nations and intervened to stop genocide in Yugoslavia, and we have 150,000 troops in Iraq working to create a democracy - while the United Nations is still too scared of terrorists, and too anti-American, to help.
In the current crisis, we have now sent the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, a maritime squadron from Guam and an amphibious ship carrying a Marine expeditionary unit to the Indian Ocean to provide assistance in search and rescue and disaster relief.
All of which is to say, in short, that the United Nations is a total and complete fraud as the "world government" that Clare Short deludes herself that it is. It's nothing more than a sandbox for starry-eyed globalists, thieves, murderers, dictators, terrorists, anti-Semites, and America-haters (amongst which is a great deal of overlap).
The Bushies know this. That's why they simply bypassed it and put them in their appropriate place, whining and yapping to be given a seat at the table. And, as at many a family holiday dinner, the President seated them at the equivalent of the card table in the living room, like the puerile internationalist urchins they are.
That's the third response, and perhaps the most poetically just as well.
Meanwhile, our disaster relief outlays continue spiraling upward. Good thing our motives for such generosity are pure, and not directed at kissing ass at Turtle Bay.
posted by JASmius at 2:38 PM
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