Critic Watch

Last week, we brought you news that Megadeth's next album will be titled United Abominations. Apparently, front man Dave Mustaine came up with that catchy phrase when he was "watching TV and saw the trucks that said 'UN' on them and said, 'Man, you are so un-cool, ineffective, anything...I thought, wow I got to run with this!'" It seems that a similar amount of thought went into the album art. Without the flags, this could just as well be another historic New York City landmark.

A couple of weeks ago, many bloggers expressed concern that Ambassador John Bolton decided to sit down for an hour-long interview with Pamela Oshry, whose Atlas Shrugs blog is far outside the mainstream. In the past weeks, attention to Oshry has subsided. Her outrages have not.

Since the outbreak of violence in Lebanon last month, the anti-UN crowd has worked overtime tarring the General Secretariat with accusations that it is pro-Hezbollah (and ergo, pro-terrorist). Writing in The Weekly Standard , Lori Lowenthal Marcus mines UNIFIL's press-releases to prove this point.

Ever the thinking person's heavy metal front man, Dave Mustaine articulates to Billboard Magazine precisely how he came up with the name of Megadeth's next studio release. "I was watching TV and saw the trucks that said 'UN' on them and said, 'Man, you are so uncool, ineffective, anything," the singer/guitarist said in a recent Billboard interview. "I thought, 'Wow, I've got to run with this. I got it -- United Abominations, 'cause it's an abomination what they're doing!"

On the Dianne Rehm show, a frequent UN critic, the American Enterprise Institute's Joshua Muravchik, admitted that if the Israeli-Hezbollah cease fire holds, the United Nations will have played a useful role in resolving this conflict. At this point, however, the success of the ceasefire is largely beyond the United Nations' control.

In the midst of defending Ambassador John Bolton's performance on the job, Thomas P. Kilgannon, author of Diplomatic Divorce: Why America Should End its Love Affair with the United Nations, claims that the Millennium Development Goals amount to "nothing more than UN-imposed tax on the American economy." This is a common canard offered by the rabidly anti-UN crowd. It's time, once and for all, to dispel the myth that the Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) are some sort of "global tax."

In a deeply misleading paragraph, the Conservative Voice claims, "The United Nations' second in command Malloch Brown [sic] said Wednesday that Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization. As Brown reports directly to UN Sec. Gen. Kofi Annan, this statement is believed to reflect the position of the entire UN body." The brief article includes no direct quotes from the Deputy Secretary General. In fact, it does not even get his name right. (His first name is "Mark", not "Malloch," which is part of his surname.) Presumably, their article is based on Malloch Brown's recent and widely discussed interview with the Financial Times. A quick review of the transcript reveals that it would be quite a stretch to interpret Malloch Brown's comments as anyway supportive of Hezbollah.

Writing in Democracy Arsenal, David Shorr asks how long it will take commentators to start talking about the crisis in Lebanon and Israel as a "failure" of the United Nations.

From Media Matters: "During his July 20 interview with U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly repeatedly lashed out at the U.N., putting Bolton in the position of defending the U.N. and its Security Council. O'Reilly called Security Council actions "a joke," accused the U.N. of not being "able to do anything," and declared that "I just think the whole place [the U.N.] is a rat's nest." In response, Bolton -- who, before being appointed ambassador to the U.N., had made comments that were harshly critical of the organization -- criticized some U.N. actions but defended many others, attempting to explain what was "worthwhile" about U.S. involvement with the U.N."