
(AP)
It's getting buried by the al-Zarqawi news, but yesterday
mustachioed American ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton had the ambassadorial version of a
hissyfit over the words of U.N. Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown.
On Tuesday, Brown berated the United States for not sufficiently supporting the U.N. and encouraging the international body's critics. "The prevailing practice of seeking to use the U.N. almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable," he said.
Brown also played media critic: "Much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News," he said.
Shockingly, the criticisms did not play well with Bolton.
"I've known you since 1989, and I'm telling you this is the worst mistake by a senior U.N. official that I have seen in that entire time," he told Secretary General Kofi Annan. He called Brown's a "condescending, patronizing tone about the American people. Fundamentally, very sadly, this was a criticism of the American people, by an international civil servant, and it's just illegitimate," adding: "Even though the target of the speech was the United States, the victim, I feel, will be the United Nations."
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