Elsewhere in the same article, we learn that this is a habit of Nauru’s:

Recently, it has begun to dabble in foreign-policy hardball. In 2002, Nauru severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan, coincident with a reported pledge of $130 million from China. Three years later, it switched again, prompting a Chinese official to grumble that the islanders were “only interested in material gains.”

When the ChiComs accuse you of avarice and selling-out, you know you’re a real sonuvabitch.

UN committee calls Tasers “torture” and advises Portugal not to use them. I’ll think about this for a while.

(via Slashdot)

Romney calls global body a ‘failure’

By JIM DAVENPORT
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

	Republican presidential hopeful, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney laughs in response to a reporter’s question during a news conference at the Ohio State University Airport in Columbus, Ohio, Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2007. (AP Photo/Paul Vernon)

PAWLEYS ISLAND, S.C. — Republican White House hopeful Mitt Romney called the United Nations a failure on Thursday and said he would support a new coalition of the free nations of the world.

The former Massachusetts governor said the U.N. Human Rights Council has repeatedly condemned Israel while taking no action against nations with repressive regimes.

“The United Nations has been an extraordinary failure of late,” Romney said in response to a question at a pancake house along the coast of early voting South Carolina. “We should withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council.”

Actually, the United States doesn’t have a seat on the human rights council, which it has been boycotting.

Romney also said he would support a new “coalition of the free nations of the world and bring those nations together so that we can act together.”

Theres a lot not to like about Mitt – but in some of the issues dear to my heart he gets it right.

The U.N. is as corrupt, brutal and morally compromised as Ahmadinejad himself. In its many affronts to civilization and decency, the U.N. has long since outlived its usefulness and reason for being. Time to shut it down.

Sounds harsh, we know. Isn’t it better, you ask, to have a place where people can peaceably gather and talk out their problems?

Sad as it is to say, the answer is no. For the U.N. has been hijacked by a rather diverse group of kleptocrats, dictators and fanatics who have successfully used it to their own rather nefarious ends.

They’re almost as good as John Derbyshire:

Here’s my candidate for the biggest outrage of all: that the United Nations—and the corrupt, verminous parasites who staff it—are allowed to carry out their filthy work on U.S. territory.  They should be expelled, and the UN headquarters site should be burned to the ground, and the ground should then be sown with salt.  The UN is an atrocity, an insult to all human decency and human values, and it should not occupy one square inch of U.S. soil. Am I making my feelings plain here?  I hope so.

Well, we can always hope.

Typically regarded as the paragon of humanitarianism, refugee camps are in fact one of the biggest stains on the conscience of the international community. The inmates of these facilities lack freedom of movement and have no right to work. They are sometimes not allowed to grow their own food and must depend on rations from humanitarian agencies. Those rations do not always come on time and are rarely sufficient. Refugees are forbidden to sell or barter them for other products they need, such as soap or underwear. Biological anthropologist Kenneth Porter found that Burundian adolescents born in refugee camps and raised on humanitarian assistance in Tanzania were significantly shorter than poor Tanzanian children in neighboring villages who received no assistance at all — a difference that suggests malnutrition while under international protection.

Guglielmo Verdirame of the University of Cambridge and Barbara Harrell-Bond, founding director of the Refugee Studies Center at the University of Oxford, and co-authors of Rights in Exile: Janus-Faced Humanitarianism, found that found that UNHCR in Uganda and Kenya imposed unpaid work on refugees confined to camps, supported dispute resolution mechanisms that illegally imprisoned people for adultery, and failed to protect women from genital mutilation and domestic violence.

UNHCR has even imposed collective punishment on refugees under its protection. In the hellish Kakuma camp in north-eastern Kenya, some refugees protested their conditions by destroying the enclosures through which refugees are herded to collect their food, once in April 1994 and again in April 1996. UNHCR cut off all food distribution, including to women and children, until the enclosures were rebuilt by the refugees. The suspension lasted 21 days in the first case and 14 in the second. Such measures are forbidden even in wartime by Article 33 of the Geneva Convention.

We’re not fans of lawsuits around here, but the UN has earned one.  A pity that

You cannot sue the United Nations. If the UN violates your rights, that’s just too bad. There is no judge with jurisdiction, no independent tribunal, no possibility of compensation or justice.

Someone needs to sue them.

Here’s my candidate for the biggest outrage of all: that the United Nations—and the corrupt, verminous parasites who staff it—are allowed to carry out their filthy work on U.S. territory.  They should be expelled, and the UN headquarters site should be burned to the ground, and the ground should then be sown with salt.  The UN is an atrocity, an insult to all human decency and human values, and it should not occupy one square inch of U.S. soil. Am I making my feelings plain here?  I hope so.

If John Bolton cannot be confirmed as UN Ambassador, perhaps John Derbyshire could be sent in his stead.

All the declared candidates are from Asia — which under an informal rotation system expects to field the next secretary-general — except Mrs. Vike-Freiberga, whose candidacy could sink on the geographic considerations despite the fact that several nations would like to see a woman in the post.
China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, signaled early that it would not accept a candidate from a country outside Asia.

Gah.  The whole system is annoying.  Still, if they insist on putting an Asian in the Secretary General’s chair, why not Lee Kuan Yew?  That’d be fun to watch, if nothing else.

Hmmmmm….sounds awfully familiar, that tripe. Bush is “an alcoholic?” That sounds like Martin Sheen (a “good Catholic” with enough 12-step exposure to know better than to take another man’s inventory) calling President Bush “a white knuckle drunk”

Bush is a “sick man with a lot of hangups?” That sounds like almost anyone at Air America, or on any lefty blog who pretends to sophistication by suggesting – like real bigots – that President Bush is an “uptight Christian,” simply because his moral values are not theirs.

Bush “walks like John Wayne?” Crap, the press has been caricaturing President Bush as a “cowboy” since before he was elected.

All Chavez is doing is repeating exactly the idiotic crap that the left has been spewing for 6 years. And the Democrats have who have encouraged the hate.

But maybe some on the left finally understand that while they’ve been having fun and laughing while calling President Bush every manner of ugly name and insult, dangerous people have been watching. And they have made a calculation: We can disrespect Bush and America will laugh with us. Bush is weak. America is once again the appeasing “weak horse” it was throughout the 1990’s and even before…when we could attack anything and be accountable to no one.

I’m sure Hugo, once he left the guffawing chamber of hyenas at the UN, was shocked to discover that most Americans were not laughing, that even some Democrats were not.

Chavez should realize that he’s blundered when even Castro suck-up Charles Rangel criticizes him:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took his Bush-bashing to Harlem yesterday and earned a stiff rebuke from the New York district’s congressman, Rep. Charles B. Rangel, who is no fan of President Bush.

“You don’t come into my country, you don’t come into my congressional district and criticize my president,” Mr. Rangel, a Democrat, told stunned reporters on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Rangel, who is one of Mr. Bush’s harshest critics, said no foreign official should assume that “Americans do not feel offended when you offend our chief of state.”

The Daily Kos, meanwhile, still doesn’t get it (H/T):

What, if anything, was wrong with Chavez’ speech?

He didn’t genuflect before Bush like Pelosi, Rangel et al.

He told it like it was!

Chavez referred to reading Chomsky’s Hegemony essay.

There was nothing wrong with Chavez’s speech. Most of the world feels that way.

Peggy Noonan explains why it’s a big story:

But here was Hugo Chavez Wednesday to the General Assembly:

The “pretensions” of “the American empire” threaten “the survival” of mankind. The world must “halt this threat.” The American president talks “as if he owned the world” and leads a “world dictatorship” that must not be allowed to “be consolidated.” Bush will spend “the rest of [his] days as a nightmare.” The U.S. government is “imperialist, fascist, assassin, genocidal,” a “hypocritical” empire that only pretends to mourn the deaths of innocents. But not only the Mideast will rise. “People of the South,” “oppressed” by America, must “strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle.”

That’s not vague. It’s a call to arms.

The administration quickly moved to dismiss it: More bilge from the buffoon, more opera bouffe. We won’t comment or dignify.

The right doesn’t want to take him seriously (we don’t need more problems), and the left doesn’t want to see him clearly (we gave birth to that?). But Chavez’s speech achieved a great deal, and it is foolish to pretend otherwise.

He raised his own standing. He got the world to look at him. He emerged in the speech as heir to the dying Fidel Castro, who he was careful to note is still alive and kicking. Chavez doesn’t want to be the current Fidel, the old man in soft fatigues, but the Fidel of 1960, who when he went to the U.N. pointedly camped in a hotel in Harlem, and electrified the masses. Chavez even followed his speech with the announcement he was giving heating oil to the needy of the Bronx. You know what they said in the Bronx? Thanks! It went over big on local TV.

He broke through the clutter. Everyone this weekend will be discussing what he said–exactly what he said, and how he said it.

He shook things up. His speech was, essentially if implicitly, a call to resistance, by any means, to the government of the United States.

He broadened his claimed base. Chavez made the argument that it is not America versus Saddam or America versus terrorists but the American Empire versus all the yearning people of the world. He claimed as his constituency everyone unhappy with the unipolar world.

Ironically, Chavez’s blistering speech may prove beneficial to President Bush. Chavez probably thought that giving such a speech would hurt Bush in the polls, boosting his natural allies, the Democrats, and perhaps getting a more favorable administration in 2008. But he forgot that nobody likes it when a foreign leader criticizes their own leader. This is a key reason why Kissinger-style realpolitik doesn’t attempt to meddle with a country’s internal politics—it nearly always produces a backlash.

H.L. Mencken once observed: “God protects the blind, the drunk, and the United States of America.” Somehow, despite all of Bush’s and Republicans’ missteps in the past three years, I think they’re going to be all right. Having the right enemies can make life easier for you, and there’s no better enemy Bush can have right now than the blundering Hugo Chavez.

Chavez has said the United States is “afraid of truth, is afraid of independent voices,” yet Chavez has suffocated all dissent in his own backyard. Beyond rewriting the Constitution to bolster his legal power, he’s passed a law banning “the use of language deemed to be insulting to the President of the Republic.”

Indeed, any expression of dissent, public or in private, against any public official is punishable with prison.

Francisco Usón – a former minister in Chavez’s own Cabinet – recently drew a six-year jail term for expressing an opinion on television. Carlos Ortega – the president of Venezuela’s AFL-CIO-affiliated federation of workers – got a 16-year sentence for instigating a legal strike despite protests by the International Labor Organization of this unspeakable violation of human rights. (Ortega escaped from prison last month.)

Chavez claimed yesterday that the United States protects terrorism while his own government is “fully committed to combating terrorism and violence.” In fact, Chavez has demonstrably protected and armed the FARC terrorists of next-door Colombia. (He’s also presided during the greatest crime wave in Venezuelan history, with a death toll exponentially larger than any previous government’s.)

Chavez denounced capitalism as the generator of “mere poverty.” Yet, thanks to a capitalist oil boom, he has profited from the richest Venezuelan government in history – but squandered its wealth on a new Venezuelan oligarchy of petro-millionaires masquerading as government officials. Meanwhile, misery and malnutrition are at a historic high.

Chavez railed against Western-style democracy. Yet it was western style democracy that brought him into power (after his own armed coup failed) and may remove him in the end. This is why he does everything he can to hollow and weaken democratic institutions.

He has frequently praised the “participatory” models of Libya, North Korea and Cuba as ideal forms of government – countries where rulers, accountable to no one, torture, imprison and murder their opponents.

Can we all agree now that the United Nations is a worse than a farce—because at least a farce isn’t taken seriously?  Still, given how some lefties love Chavez, perhaps all Bush needs to do to get some left-wing love is to start jailing his political opponents.