When I was in high school, we occasionally would stop by the UN when it was in session (in those days the public could wander freely in the building’s public areas and there was a visitor’s gallery where you could watch and listen to debate in the General Assembly). Those were the heady days of U Thant and although I was a conservative even then, I nonetheless was filled with idealist notions about this great deliberative world body. Well, that was then and this is now.

Whatever good the UN has done through the years, whatever accomplishments it can claim, it long ago outlived its usefulness and it’s past time to pull the plug (forgive the allusion, but I have a very bitter taste in my mouth this sad morning). No, Kofi Annan is not evil, but at best he’s exceedingly incompetent, laughably self-aggrandizing and quite possibly corrupt (and he’s damn lucky that he’s not the CEO of a large US multi-national with ties to the Bush administration). I still think that he will not survive to the end of his term. And I hope that the demise of the UN itself follows in his departing wake. It was a noble experiment but also a failed one and now it’s time to start again from scratch.

Thank you again, Roger, for your yeoman’s work on this story.