Oil For Fools
I think the thing I love most about the right wingers is their commitment to principle and intellectual consistency. For instance, on the Un Foundation’s blog UN Dispatch, Peter Daou took issue with Roger Simon’s obsessing over the Oil For Food program, while never having a kind word to say about the good things the United Nations does around the world. The right blogosphere is incensed that he would dare to tell a blogger what he should blog about, and besides the oil for food scandal is, like, really really bad.
Now call me crazy, but I seem to remember some wingnuts bleating every five minutes or so about how the news media is obsessing about all the “bad news” in Iraq to exclusion of the “good.” It’s been their mantra for the last two years as a matter of fact. John Tierney of the NY Times even said just the other day that we shouldn’t talk about the suicide bombers because it gives the wrong impression — that suicide bombers are everywhere and people’s lives are threatened. Even though the Iraqi people’s lives actually are threatened and there actually are suicide bombers everywhere. Best not to harp on the bad news.
Here we have an institution, the UN, that is enmeshed in a corruption scandal — and not one that appears to be unprecedented or shocking by corruption scandal standards. Certainly, it cannot be compared to the serious everyday violence that is taking place in Iraq. And yet we have right wingers obsessing about it to the exclusion of all its substantial and important good works around the world — while they constantly complain that the news media focuses too much on wanton violence and social chaos in a country we occupy, to the exclusion of insubstantial and meaningless happy talk about schools being painted (for 2 million dollars a piece.)
The sad fact is that the UN Oil for Food scandal is becoming another one of these right wing masturbatory obsessions — like Christmas in Cambodia and Vince Foster. There are always a few of these hobby horses out there, nobody knows why.
Meanwhile the UN actually does a lot of really important work, unlike the Pottery Barn debacle in Iraq, where we are supposed to get credit for fixing what we broke. Here are just a handful of the issues the UN has been working on while the wingnuts blather on:
Tackling the threat of transnational organized crime
Shipping supplies to millions of Iraqi schoolchildren
Building thousands of homes for tsunami victims
Partnering with the private sector to meet humanitarian needs
Reducing child mortality rates
Rehabilitating Iraq’s marshlands
Rebuilding lives in Afghanistan
Fighting the global malaria epidemic
Curbing the world’s most hazardous pollutants
This right wing UN fixation is another one of those issues that goes all the way back to the Truman era. I’ll say it again; anybody who thinks the Republicans are the party of new ideas are sadly mistaken. They haven’t even joined the last half of the 20th century yet.
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