Mark Steyn Layeth The Smack Down on Turtle Bay
Some people tell me I have a talent for the written word. I've even had one person tell me she thinks I should have my own syndicated column. Any syndicators reading this post are, of course, highly encouraged to take this advice.
But even if I someday graduate from microblogger to megablogger, and from there to full-grown pundithood, I'll still look and sound illiterate next to Mark Steyn.
His column in today's London Daily Telegraph tearing the United Nations limb from oily limb is truly a thing of breathtaking beauty. It redefines the phrase "pugilistic prose." And, figuratively speaking, there's not a single UN employee that didn't get busted wide open by this series of literary chair shots.
Some selected grafs:
"...if Lynndie's smashed to pieces our entire morality with just one tug, Bush's Zionist neocons getting it on with Congolese kindergarteners would have the Independent calling for US expulsion from the UN - no, wait, from Planet Earth: slice it off from Maine to Hawaii and use one of those new Euro-Airbuses to drag it out round the back of Uranus.
But systemic UN child sex in at least 50% of their missions? The transnational morality set can barely stifle their yawns. If you're going to rape prepubescent girls, make sure you're wearing a blue helmet.
Has a double-entendred pun ever been used more skillfully, and in a purer cause?
The folks that have been under the UN wing the longest - indeed, the only ones with their own permanent UN agency and semi-centenarian "refugee camps" - are the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth: the Palestinians. UN territories like Kosovo are the global equivalent of inner-city council estates with the blue helmets as local enforcers for the absentee slum landlord. By contrast, a couple of years after imperialist warmonger Bush showed up, Afghanistan and Iraq have elections, presidents and prime ministers.
Can the truth be summed up any better and more succinctly than that? If we fail the "global test," it's only because the UN should be headquartered on Bizzaro World instead, where everything else is backward as well.
Makes a perverse sort of sense, though. Liberalism stopped being about real-world results and started being all about corruption-besotted "good intentions" and preening moral vanity a long, long time ago. At Turtle Bay it's simply reaching its logical and inevitable nadir.
How about this pile-driver?
[When the tsunami hit], the humanitarian fat cats were back in New York and Geneva holding press conferences warning about post-tsunami health consequences - dysentery, cholera, BSE from water-logged cattle, etc - that, they assured us, would kill as many people as the original disaster. But it never happened, any more than did their predictions of disaster for Iraq ("The head of the World Food Programme has warned that Iraq could spiral into a massive humanitarian disaster") or Afghanistan ("The UN Children's Fund has estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghan children could die of cold, disease and hunger").
It's one thing to invent humanitarian disasters to disparage Bush's unilateralist warmongering, but a month ago the UN was reduced to inventing a humanitarian disaster in order to distract attention from the existing humanitarian disaster it wasn't doing anything about.
But about which it was self-righteously denouncing the "stingy" Bush Administration for doing too little. Which was, of course, almost a billion dollars in aid ago.
Dr. Steyn's diagnosis is just as direct and on-target:
All this derives from a UN culture in which the free nations have met the thug states so much more than half way that they now largely share the dictators' view of their peoples - as either helpless children who need every decision made for them, or a bunch of dupes whose national wealth you can reroute to your Swiss bank account, or a never-ending source of fresh meat.
The UN is irrelevant. It is corrupt. It is useless. It's worse than the League of Nations ever was, because the League wasn't around long enough for the world's Bad Guys to infiltrate, and twist and subvert against its own original lofty principles.
World affairs have never been even collaterally influenced by such transnational scheming societies. Far from being a receptacle for world government, the UN is a metaphorical pink cadillac, capable only of serving as the vehicle for perverts, haters, thieves, and tyrants, beyond any attainable threshold of moral salvage.
To employ Mr. Steyn's metaphor, let us pull out our quart of ice cream and leave the quart of dog crap to wallow in its own fetid transnational stench.
The whipped cream of democracy is much to be preferred in its stead.
But even if I someday graduate from microblogger to megablogger, and from there to full-grown pundithood, I'll still look and sound illiterate next to Mark Steyn.
His column in today's London Daily Telegraph tearing the United Nations limb from oily limb is truly a thing of breathtaking beauty. It redefines the phrase "pugilistic prose." And, figuratively speaking, there's not a single UN employee that didn't get busted wide open by this series of literary chair shots.
Some selected grafs:
"...if Lynndie's smashed to pieces our entire morality with just one tug, Bush's Zionist neocons getting it on with Congolese kindergarteners would have the Independent calling for US expulsion from the UN - no, wait, from Planet Earth: slice it off from Maine to Hawaii and use one of those new Euro-Airbuses to drag it out round the back of Uranus.
But systemic UN child sex in at least 50% of their missions? The transnational morality set can barely stifle their yawns. If you're going to rape prepubescent girls, make sure you're wearing a blue helmet.
Has a double-entendred pun ever been used more skillfully, and in a purer cause?
The folks that have been under the UN wing the longest - indeed, the only ones with their own permanent UN agency and semi-centenarian "refugee camps" - are the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth: the Palestinians. UN territories like Kosovo are the global equivalent of inner-city council estates with the blue helmets as local enforcers for the absentee slum landlord. By contrast, a couple of years after imperialist warmonger Bush showed up, Afghanistan and Iraq have elections, presidents and prime ministers.
Can the truth be summed up any better and more succinctly than that? If we fail the "global test," it's only because the UN should be headquartered on Bizzaro World instead, where everything else is backward as well.
Makes a perverse sort of sense, though. Liberalism stopped being about real-world results and started being all about corruption-besotted "good intentions" and preening moral vanity a long, long time ago. At Turtle Bay it's simply reaching its logical and inevitable nadir.
How about this pile-driver?
[When the tsunami hit], the humanitarian fat cats were back in New York and Geneva holding press conferences warning about post-tsunami health consequences - dysentery, cholera, BSE from water-logged cattle, etc - that, they assured us, would kill as many people as the original disaster. But it never happened, any more than did their predictions of disaster for Iraq ("The head of the World Food Programme has warned that Iraq could spiral into a massive humanitarian disaster") or Afghanistan ("The UN Children's Fund has estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghan children could die of cold, disease and hunger").
It's one thing to invent humanitarian disasters to disparage Bush's unilateralist warmongering, but a month ago the UN was reduced to inventing a humanitarian disaster in order to distract attention from the existing humanitarian disaster it wasn't doing anything about.
But about which it was self-righteously denouncing the "stingy" Bush Administration for doing too little. Which was, of course, almost a billion dollars in aid ago.
Dr. Steyn's diagnosis is just as direct and on-target:
All this derives from a UN culture in which the free nations have met the thug states so much more than half way that they now largely share the dictators' view of their peoples - as either helpless children who need every decision made for them, or a bunch of dupes whose national wealth you can reroute to your Swiss bank account, or a never-ending source of fresh meat.
The UN is irrelevant. It is corrupt. It is useless. It's worse than the League of Nations ever was, because the League wasn't around long enough for the world's Bad Guys to infiltrate, and twist and subvert against its own original lofty principles.
World affairs have never been even collaterally influenced by such transnational scheming societies. Far from being a receptacle for world government, the UN is a metaphorical pink cadillac, capable only of serving as the vehicle for perverts, haters, thieves, and tyrants, beyond any attainable threshold of moral salvage.
To employ Mr. Steyn's metaphor, let us pull out our quart of ice cream and leave the quart of dog crap to wallow in its own fetid transnational stench.
The whipped cream of democracy is much to be preferred in its stead.
posted by JASmius at 7:59 PM
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