Mohammed Fadhil on a meeting between thug and (would-be) quisling:

The leader of freedom and democracy and the defender of human rights in the Middle East the elected President his Excellency Bashar Assad met the man of humanity and peace, the pioneer human rights ranger and the Gandhi of the 21st Century British MP George Galloway.

In George Galloway's braggadocio is a naked contempt for mankind: had the Briton's personal appeals for Saddam Hussein been granted two years ago, well-founded sarcasm would have led Mohammed to a Ba'ath dungeon. Still, Galloway belongs in the company of gangsters. As Mohammed suggests, Providence might notice and reserve for Bashar Assad the same fate as Hussein.

Last week I questioned, very facetiously, whether treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay included pies and banana peels. The left has made another swan dive into self-parody with a Time magazine commentary noting guards performing a "puppet show 'satirizing [a] detainee's involvement with al-Qaeda.'"

Moral cowardice along the boundary between left and right, found abundantly among timid congressmen, is the only instrument capable of politically damaging the Bush administration on wartime detention policy. How can a majority of the American public grow angry over anything other than the use of taxpayer funds to grant terrorists and their accessories more cultural and personal consideration than felons in Auburn, New York? The left, on this tack, is its own disputant. James Lileks, who curiously enough went straight to Monty Python when confronted with absurdity, too, has more.

Says Wretchard, a man qualified to speak empirically, about an insult:

I'd have to say that Amnesty International's Report claiming the US is the world's worst human rights violator condemns itself far more than it does the United States. Anyone who has lived in the Third World or any of the places which Amnesty International purports to care about knows — and I mean knows for a fact — what police abuse, torture, arbitrary detention, etc. really are and that it cannot be compared in any wise to the "Gulag" in Guantanamo Bay. Moreover, anyone who has lived in such places knows that the last place where victims can find practical help is from Amnesty International.

After dinner last night I left the television on while I worked from across the apartment. The O'Reilly Factor came on and Bill O'Reilly interviewed two men, one rightly dismissing Amnesty International and its propaganda; the other excusing it. At the end of the segment an understandably disgusted O'Reilly tried to establish one common notion with the second man, that of the Geneva convention meaning what it says, only to receive an answer out of a freshman-curriculum philosophy class: What really constitutes a uniform? said the man, straight-faced. If he had been on the other end of a telephone line, O'Reilly would and should have hung up.

Paging Bono of rock band U2: in your future albums' liner notes, please direct fans to organizations whose sanctimonious work is not totally discrepant to both their charter and the substance of your song lyrics.

Quote care of Shepard Smith on last night's The Fox Report.

Meet Benon Sevan — former administrator of the United Nations "Oil for Food" program for Saddam Hussein's regime; apparent swindler, fraud and bribe-taker; nephew of a "rich aunt" who recently tumbled to her death down an elevator shaft around the time Sevan blamed $160,000 in his bank account on her generosity. He's asked for an extension of the two-week period given to him by the United Nations in which to respond to charges raised by an interim report from former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

Why an innocent man would need more than fourteen days to prepare a defense is unclear. Since the Manhattan district attorney has begun a separate criminal probe, and United States senators have asked for the bureaucrat to be stripped of his diplomatic immunity, Sevan must not have completed his one-way travel arrangements.

Savor it:

When 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail. What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.

..."They followed the guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement." Last night Greenpeace said two protesters were in hospital, one with a suspected broken jaw, the other with concussion.

It seems not all city gents are frightened by mobs of gangly, Junior Woodchuck hippies. For those who were inspired to join Greenpeace from U2 album liner notes: subscribe to the band's fanzine instead.

WITH APOLOGIES: Carl Barks aficionados impel me to give the real Junior Woodchucks their due.

We knew Ted Turner was intellectually challenged, but now the media mogul has revealed himself as fashionably ignorant of history. On the Political Grapevine of tonight's Special Report with Brit Hume: a report of the CNN founder likening, somehow, Fox News to Adolf Hitler. And Fox News to President Bush, then back to Hitler. Somehow.

Said a Fox News spokesman in response, "Ted is understandably bitter. He's lost his ratings, his network, and now his mind. We wish him well." [Slight revision, having heard it a second time. Even sharper.]

Glenn Reynolds links to John O'Sullivan's latest contribution to holding the United Nations accountable for its abject failure to serve its purpose. Accountability, however, is a word that can't be found in the General Assembly's glossary. O'Sullivan:

[Americans] look at the multiplying scandals around the United Nations and wonder how the man in charge can avoid being held responsible for any of it by other countries.

But the explanation is simple: Kofi Annan is the symbol of the United Nations' lack of accountability. He is never held responsible for what goes wrong, because the United Nations is never held responsible, either. It sails in a cloud of noble idealism over the actual failures, hypocrisy, corruption and outright criminality that attend some U.N. actions on the ground below.

Corrupt diplomats and bureaucrats are easiest made objects of comic shame, but their aims are sinister enough: they consider themselves above both reproach and debate, deserving of power where there is no mandate. That is the germ of authoritarianism. The United Nations has become a laboratory for compulsory rule, a master class for strongmen in suits and ties to do what would otherwise be impossible within a democratic state. Hopefully, the fast-distending scandals publicized by new media will convince enough people — Americans, at least — that this international body is not a model for a harmonious future but the vestige of an oligarchic past.

First we learn that North Korea's hermetic seal might be breaking. Then the insufferable enabler Kofi Annan faces mutiny on his ship of fools:

UN staff are expected to make an unprecedented vote of no confidence in Secretary-General Kofi Annan, union sources say, after a series of scandals tainted his term in charge of the world body.

The UN staff union, in what officials said was the first vote of its kind in the almost 60-year history of the United Nations, was set to approve a resolution withdrawing support for Annan and senior UN management.

Annan has been in the line of fire over a series of scandals including controversy about a UN aid program that investigators say allowed deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to embezzle billions of dollars. Staffers said the trigger for the no-confidence measure was an announcement this week that Annan had pardoned the UN's top oversight official, who was facing allegations of favouritism and sexual harassment.

Sounds like we've got a zeitgeist not only falling but pirouetting in a triple-flip into the Grand Canyon as it fills up with lava. Anything goes. If you partake, buy a lottery ticket.

Apply to become a prominent cartoonist for the left: white hood optional.

'STAND UP FOR FREEDOM TOGETHER': For those who claim the banner of progress but actually tear at it regularly, a little source reading is in order.

LIKE HYENAS, ONLY LESS CIVILIZED: Via IP, a roll call of angry ink. There's a silver lining to all this, and that's the metric we can draw from leftists: the more violent the tantrum, the further away they must be from power.

Here's a subtle but prevalent example of the politics of coercion, and another reason to say, "Thank God we won on Election Day." If you live near colleges and universities, defaced stop signs are as abundant as those left untouched. Occasionally the suburbs and urban thoroughfares get marked. Some are stenciled, the results of an obviously organized effort; others, like this one, on a street in my parents' neighborhood called Park Place, are just crude vandalizations with a spray can. I can remember having seen this sort of thing for almost a decade. Usually drivers are instructed to stop wearing fur or eating meat; for some signs it's the World Bank (whose dissolution isn’t a bad idea in itself, but not worth wrecking a stop sign). When President Bush began take actions that aggravated the nihilist left, like asserting American power and staking a claim for the moral superiority of capitalist democracy, his name began to appear on red octagons, too.

Over the years, for all the scores of signs, I've never seen nor heard of a defacing that advocated anything other than a leftist cause.

The most stinging irony in all of this is that the person who did it is most likely of the demographic that's least likely to advance a cause by actually voting. Too bad, kid.