About that "deadbeat donor" remark

I had been thinking about Ban Ki-moon's spectacularly undiplomatic statement for a while, trying to put my disgust into words. Then I stumbled across an editorial on the matter from Investor's Business Daily that says it perfectly. In a show of poor taste of my own, I'm quoting the entire piece.

U.S. Deadbeats?

United Nations: It takes some gall to grumble about getting billions in U.S. taxpayer handouts. Does U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expect spend-happy Uncle Sam to give the corrupt U.N. its own stimulus?

It wasn't the way to win friends and influence people in the U.S. Congress — even this spendthrift band of power-drunk lawmakers.

In a private meeting with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the secretary-general called America a "deadbeat" nation because U.S. taxpayers have been slow in chucking out another billion dollars in dues.

The U.S. ponies up some 22% of the nearly $5 billion U.N. budget. We also host that body's gaggle of diplomats in the cosmopolitan capital of the world, New York City, where they can dine, philander and double-park (via VIP license plates) in high style.

Yet after giving them all that, and after hearing their never-ending attacks against the U.S., our economic freedoms and our near-unilateral military efforts to fight terrorism in the world, we also get subjected to insults and name-calling for being late with the money.

As described by the Associated Press, when Ban was asked if he had actually used the word "deadbeat," the U.N. chief answered, " 'Yes, I did — I did,' then laughed mischievously."
With liberal Democrats in power in both the White House and Congress, Ban can afford to laugh; he and the U.N.'s Third World majority are confident that in the coming years no John Bolton or Jeane Kirkpatrick will be holding them to much account.

No one will invite the U.N. to relocate, as Kirkpatrick deputy Charles Lichtenstein famously did a quarter-century ago, with the assurance that the U.S. mission "will be down at the dockside waving you a fond farewell as you sail off into the sunset."

The more one examines the U.N.'s record of corruption and criminality, the more attractive Sen. John McCain's idea of a "League of Democracies" looks.

How can an international body be taken seriously when the committee it convenes to organize a "racism summit," next month's Durban Review Conference in Geneva, is chaired by one of the worst human rights violators and supporters of terrorism in the world, Moammar Gadhafi's Libya? Among that same committee's other members are Iran, Cuba and Russia.

What can be said of an organization that fancies itself the hope of the oppressed in the world — yet is condemned by the Save the Children charity because its "peacekeeping troops" and other officials were found "trading food for sex," along with committing "rape, child prostitution, pornography, indecent sexual assault and trafficking of children for sex"?

Victims of such U.N. criminality were found to be as young as 6 in places like Haiti, the Ivory Coast and Southern Sudan.

What hope is there for an organization that undermines its own sanctions against a terrorist regime like that of the late Saddam Hussein in Iraq with an oil-for-food program that illegally hands over $13 billion to Saddam — with a slew of U.N. officials profiting along the way, including the son of former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan?

The outrage is not that the U.S. taxpayers' check to the U.N. is late; it's that year after year we continue to finance this global cesspool without demanding reform.