December 22, 2005
Trust these guys?
I saw video of this on FOXNews. UN SecGen Kofi Annan is asked a question, becomes petulant and attacks the interrogator.
I tried to imagine an elected official in the US behaving this way. But as a UN official, Annan is --of course -- responsible to no one. Claudia Rosett (who else?) has an article on this latest Annan misstep:
The broad answer is that the U.N. Secretariat, despite all the recent talk of reform, evidently remains a place of secrecy and privilege, run by high officials who don’t mind talking about their global goals and grand legacies, but find it highly irritating to be held to normal standards of good governance or subjected to anything resembling the workings of a free press. And in this particular case, given the ferocity of Annan’s reaction, one has to wonder if there is even more to it.
The real reminder here is not the misuse of privilege, it's the absolute unaccountability of anybody at the UN. If a reporter cannot ask them a question, they can certainly not be trusted with anything of any importance.
I don't want to go black-helicopter, but the Democrats still insist that we could/should have/can still do more through the UN. If the organization cannot be fixed, it needs to be discredited so that Americans stop believing that it is an alternative to anything but enforceable parking tickets.
I agree wholeheartedly about the lack of accountability at the UN, but I have to wonder, given our current President and Sec.of Defense, can you really not image petulance and derogatory attacks by a US official on the press?
Posted by: Silence Dogood at December 23, 2005 12:15 PMYes. I don't know if you saw the exchange or were able to get the character of it from the story, but I can really not imagine President Bush nor Secretary Rumsfeld insulting a reporter and refusing to answer the question.
Helen Thomas's outrageous, fever-swamp questions were always treated seriously in Presidential Press Conferences. I always wanted to see the President treat her like Annan treated Bone, but he never did
A politician can duck a question, spin off an answer to different question -- all manner of trickery. But you would not see someone insult the questioner and move along. Governor Bush in the 2000 election refused to answer cocaine questions but he treated each new instance seriously.
Posted by: jk at December 23, 2005 4:38 PM | What do you think? [2]