Eleanor Roosevelt is turning over in her grave.

Mrs. Roosevelt chaired the first Human Rights Commission for the United Nations and was a strong influence in the writing and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the UN’s founding documents. Article 19 of that Declaration states:

Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

One would think that such a right would be self evident to everyone. Well...almost everyone:

“The prevailing practice of seeking to use the U.N. almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable,” said the deputy, Mark Malloch Brown. “You will lose the U.N. one way or another.”

In a highly unusual instance of a United Nations official singling out an individual country for criticism, Mr. Malloch Brown said that although the United States was constructively engaged with the United Nations in many areas, the American public was shielded from knowledge of that by Washington’s tolerance of what he called “too much unchecked U.N.-bashing and stereotyping.”

“Much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News,” he said.

Richard A. Grenell, the spokesman for John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador, said Mr. Bolton had not had time to read the speech to react to it fully on Tuesday evening. “Mr. Malloch Brown did not extend to us the courtesy of a copy of the speech,” Mr. Grenell said. “We need to read it and will certainly have to respond.”

Just how, praytell, would Mr. Brown wish the United States government to “check” what he calls “U.N.-bashing and stereotyping.”

Well, there are those Haliburton built concentration camps out in Utah that were constructed to hold liberal dissenters. Maybe we could round up a few UN bashers and send them to live with the Mormons.

As Godlstein points out, UN Ambassador Bolton’s mustache was twitching furiously at this bit of jaw dropping lunacy:

John Bolton’s straight-talking mustache, “Regis,” reacts to complaints by UN deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown that US criticism of the UN undermines the orgnanization’s mission:

Regis: “Yeah, whatever. Just so long as Brown remembers that when I pinch him on his ass, that means I want him to run and fetch me a sandwich and a Snapple. And none of that peach iced-tea sh*t like last time, either. Some of us still take our masculinity seriously.”

Meanwhile, the mustache’s other half was livid:

In a furious reaction, Bolton called the speech by UN chief Kofi Annnan’s deputy a “very grave mistake.”

“We are in the process of an enormous effort to achieve substantial reform at the United Nations,” he said. “To have the deputy secretary general criticize the United States in such a manner can only do great harm to the United nations.

“Even though the target of the speech was the United States, the victim, I fear, will be the United Nations,” he added. “Even worse was the condescending and patronizing tone about the American people. This was a criticism of the American people not the American government by an international civil servant.”

The US envoy to the UN said the only way “to mitigate the damage to the United Nations” was for Annan to “personally and publicly repudiate this speech at the earliest possible opportunity.”

How dare Mr. Bolton use such…such…UNDIPLOMATIC language! Doesn’t he know that the default position of the United States in these circumstances is bended knee subservience, mumbled apologia, and a promise not to let it happen again?

The UN is a vipers nest of vile anti-Americanism. Much of this has very little to do with our actual policies and more to do with pleasing the folks back home. What little good comes out of the United Nations – third world health issues, refugee assistance – is offset by its continuing irrelevancy in the face of true evil. The list is endless. The Balkans, Somalia, Congo, Darfur, and, its biggest failure in history, Rwanda.

As a supra-national aid agency, the UN functions just about as well as one would expect a gigantic bureaucracy could – just well enough not to allow too many people to die. But as an organization set up to keep the peace, negotiate disputes between member states, act as a watchdog to prevent rogue states from getting weapons that will kill millions – the UN is a total and complete failure, a danger to the continued existence of the United States and by extension, the western world. It should be downgraded considerably while regional security associations take on the task of peacekeeping. And as far as WMD, there has never been a state that sought them that failed to make them. With a record of abject failure like that, one would think that even a liberal would throw up their hands in disgust.

One would think that Brown’s remarks were approved by Kofi Annan. If not, Brown should be tossed from the top story of the UN building without a parachute. Or, failing that, Annan should fire his well-fed posterior and apologize profusely for suggesting that the United States government adopt the tactics of the dictators and thugs that the Secretary General likes to hobnob with on a regular basis.

Bolton has been working like a dog trying to reform some of the more egregious aspects of the UN. And he’s doing it the only way that the bureaucratic lickspittles at the UN can understand; by threatening to cut the purse strings:

The world body faces possible financial gridlock at the end of the month, when a 950-million dollar spending cap on a two-year 3.798 billion-dollar (3.2 billion-euro) UN budget agreed last December expires, if wealthy and developing countries fail to reach agreement on a package of management reforms proposed by Annan.

Washington has threatened to withdraw funding if the reforms are not adopted by then, and EU countries have said they will have to take another look at their contributions.

When even the Europeans might “take another look at their contributions,” you know that Bolton is dead serious about trying to reform the UN. And mostly what Bolton is proposing amounts to injecting a little accountability into the wildly unaccountable secretariat. No one knows how much money the SecGen spends to grease the wheels of diplomacy (and line the pockets of his friends and family). Getting a handle on that aspect of UN corruption would seem to be a good starting point.