The American Spectator

Rise and shine, sleepyheads. You thought this year might be different? C’mon, guys. It’s barely nine hours old here in Virginia, and we already have adequate proofs that 2006 is just 2005’s ugly sister.

The J-Post reports, based on a story in a German newspaper, that we are planning a military strike on Iran. This is a combination of German disdain for any war Germany doesn’t start and Israelis thinking wishfully that we will do it before they have to. And the London Times reports that the ever-charming Kim Jong-il’s regime is restarting a nuclear reactor that will enable it to make about ten nuclear weapons a year. This despite the six-party talks that were supposed to get the North Korean genie back in the bottle.

Cheer up. The UN, as always, is ready to provide comic relief. The UN’s leaders have finally realized that the UN Human Rights Commission, memorably chaired by Libya in 2003, is shredding - daily - the little credibility the UN has. So they’re seeking a replacement for it. According to a report in today’s New York Times, UN bureaucrats and ambassadors, seeking to restore some of that credibility, are rushing to come up with an alternative to the HRC. Their time — and ours — would be better spent devising an alternative to the UN, comprised only of democracies.

There is no reason to expect the next version of the HRC to be nearly as good a result as if the people whose names appear as the first fifty on the list of the next graduating class at Parris Island were assigned the task. They are unsuited to the UN job, having the capacity to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong.