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For those of you who haven’t listened to Claudia’s interview on Hot Air, you really should.

She’s not just informative — her informal, extemporaneous delivery and her command of the issues are very, very persuasive. At least to me.

Brian

From http://www.undispatch.com

Claudia Rosett’s Parting Shot Misses the Mark

I’ve often wondered how Claudia Rosett will cope with Kofi Annan’s departure. After all, she has earned her name tarring and feathering a man who is about to abandon his pulpit. Once Annan leaves office, those who actually follow her attempts to stir controversy are sure to lose interest.

Nevertheless, as a parting gift to the person she built a career slandering, Rosett recently produced a lengthy – if confusing – New York Sun article purporting to “prove” that Kofi Annan’s nephew now lives in the same rent-controlled apartment where Annan lived prior to becoming Secretary General. Of course, Rosett admits that there is nothing illegal about this arrangement-which, incidentally, Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald calls “the usual Third-World immigrant pile-into-the-cheap-apartment thing.” Still, that does not stop Rosett from fuming about the appearance of impropriety, which she feels stems from the fact that “Annan, whose wife comes from one of Sweden’s wealthier families, has spent years lecturing Americans on how the well-heeled have obligations to those less fortunate.”

In case you are wondering where to find the outrage, dear reader, let me summarize: Kofi Annan’s nephew lives in a rent-controlled apartment that is leased to Kofi Annan’s brother, who is Ghana’s ambassador to Morocco. But at one time-as long ago as 1978-this apartment served as Annan’s residence. And now, this all worthy of a lengthy expose in the New York Sun because the person who currently resides in this rent controlled apartment has a rich aunt.

If this is the kind of “dirt” that Rosett is now throwing Annan’s direction, I think we can safely assume that Rosett is panicking. To be sure, Rosett can still hype her manufactured controversies after Annan leaves office in January, but fewer and fewer people will care.

Posted by Mark Leon Goldberg -

Mr. Mark Leon Goldberg wrote:

Nevertheless, as a parting gift to the person she built a career slandering . . .

I love it: the compound question fallacy (tell me, Mr. Goldberg, do you still beat your wife?) and the poisoning the well fallacy (because Claudia has made a career out of exposing Mr. Annan and the UN, her claims about them are untrue), all to construct an ad hominem attack (another logical fallacy)!

And all in one sentence! I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it!

Still, I must agree with you on one thing: it does seem like Claudia has built a career both on UN corruption, and Mr. Annan’s failure to address it in the UN, if not his active participation in the corruption itself.

And I would criticize Claudia for this: Why, with all the material at your disposal, Claudia, have you built only one career out of exposing UN corruption, incompetence and malfeasance? What’s wrong with you that you haven’t built a dozen more careers on it all?

It’s not like you lack for raw material, after all . . .

But seriously . . . I’ve read much of what Claudia’s written, seen her on the tube a couple of times, and heard her interviewed. She may be the malevelant witch Mr. Goldberg portrays her as, but if so, she keeps it remarkably well hidden, at least from me. Perhaps she’s cast a spell that blinds me to her true nature . . ..

But even if she were as wicked, nasty, basely-motivated and self-serving as you, Mr. Goldberg, evidently believe her to be, so what?

The UN is what it is: you, Mr. Goldberg, cannot erase the corruption of the massive Oil for Food scandal; Mr. Annan’s lethargy (my most charitable term) towards uncovering its details and who’s responsible in the UN for it (much less punishing them); the human rights abuses committed by unpunished peacekeepers while under the UN banner; or the averted eyes of that august body as genocide was committed in Rwanda, Bosnia and is now being committed in the Sudan. (Please recall that it was the hated Great Satan — the US — which first used the term “genocide” to describe what’s happening in the Sudan.)

The appartment issue may not be huge in your mind, Mr. Goldberg, but it does raise issues of impropriety in my own, and it is consistent with Mr. Annan’s history (like the Mercedes, and his sons employment . . .).

Oh — you may be right about Claudia “panicking,” but somehow I don’t think so . . .

Brian

RE: Mark Goldberg

What’s the world coming to? It takes almost no time at all for it to go off the tracks. I turn around for a moment to get the grape stains out of some Saturnalia garb, and come back for a luxuriant read of my favorite blog only to find……that a poisonous little mushroom has sprouted here in the comments section! Best, perhaps, to get the tongs out and have a quick look at the specimen before the herbicide that Brian has so kindly and effectively spritzed on it takes more of a toll.
Mmm, yes, interesting…. Upon examination, what we find here is a larval variety of lefty shill masquerading as a Young Foreign Policy Professional. Note the crinkles in the cap, a marker of cogitatus falsus often seen in the European stock, now showing up more often in American clones…. Forgive my amusement; but, it’s really a treat. — Socialist “human rights” summer camp in The Netherlands (sophomore stoner summer abroad?) does not a Foreign Policy Professional make. (1), (2)
Enough with the botany……
Mr. Goldberg’s oeuvre in The American Prospect reveals that he has been quite taken up with John Bolton. Mr. Goldberg’s proudest moments to date seem to be his series of hit pieces on Ambassador Bolton. Check the whole Goldbergian oeuvre at TAP: ( http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?name=View+Author&section=root&id=1132 ). Here’s one of his Bolton screeds, “The Arsonist”: ( http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10734 ). It looks as though the assessment of his Tufts Yearbook about him is proving prescient: “Oh, Mark, what a guy! He’d run over his nearest and dearest, if he had any, to be first to climb into uncle George Soros’ wallet. Way to go, Marko!”(3) If we judge by his Sheherazade routine about Ambassador Bolton, I think we can rest assured that Mr. Goldberg has found a place nestled all cozy in amongst the Benjamins in Mr. Soros’ hip pocket. (4)
As for Mr. Goldberg’s attempt at an attack on Ms. Rosett’s latest archeological dig into the transgressions of the now, Heaven Thanks!, former S.G., the saintly Kofi, it has all the hallmarks of his budding personal slash and burn pulp fiction techniques as Brian has so cogently noted. The UN fanboys don’t like the public light of day shone on the murky, hypocritical goings on of the denizens of Turtle Bay, especially the K-man. Such dreams of glory they have nurtured, but how quickly they wither when UN corruption and hypocrisy are exposed to public scrutiny. Makes a fellow cross. Here’s a news flash for Mr. Goldberg: there is such a quantity of scandal and corruption buried wide and deep at the UN, that, in the happy event that Ms. Rosett were to be cloned a thousand thousand times, her bazillions of selves, even with their combined brilliance, would have to work very long and hard indeed to bring all the UN horrors out into the open. We’re talking M-theory-eleven-dimension-spacetime-infinite-quantities of corruption and scandal here. It’s no wonder that the UN lads get nervous and tetchy whenever Ms. Rosett brings forth a new revelation.
The music’s not over just because Kofi has left the building.
A few final observations for Mr. Goldberg….. Don’t be surprised at not being taken seriously. When you shill for the likes of the UN kleptocrats, and regurgitate liberal Demo talking points for a living, don’t imagine that your motives and connections are invisible. When you live on George Soros’ (4) and Ted Turner’s (5) dime, don’t imagine that no one will notice. Don’t imagine that your words will be taken for anything but the propaganda and cheap attempts at character assassination that they are. Go back under your rock.
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***Notes/or/ See How Easy it is to Screw with Your Subject/or/ Slash and Burn for Everyone:

(1) This is true: He does/did belong to this organization: ( http://www.ypfp.org/ ), and does allude to his human rights jaunt to the Netherlands one summer while at Tufts in this interview for the organization: ( http://www.ypfp.org/StepfordWonk?PHPSESSID=43a6ac0466b1401b03c08b169f9f1c93 ).

What I didn’t bother to mention (why burden the reader with extraneous facts that don’t support my slash and burn anyway!): he’s done some time with the New America Foundation ( http://www.newamerica.net/ ), a DC think tank.

(2) This is true, if tartly put: “Socialist ‘human rights’ summer camp in The Netherlands……..” A little research on the Board of Directors and associates of ( http://www.humanityinaction.org/ ), leads one to the conclusion that they must have responsive readings from Marx and Lenin.

(3) Almost pure fiction. But catchy, no? And besides, who’s to know….
He did go to Tufts. However, his Yearbook entry said: ….. Tough luck: Tisch Library is closed on week-ends during vacations. So, we’ll have to wait for next week for these deathless words.

(4) True. George Soros’ Open Society Institute is a donor to Mr. Goldberg’s employer, The American Prospect, which shills for the Demos and whatever liberal cause du jour is being pushed at the moment.
Root around on the web, and have a look at The American Prospect donor list. Amongst others you will find: The Annie E. Casey Foundation (donor to every liberal group under the sun), the JEHT (Justice, Equality, Human dignity, ­­­­and Tolerance) Foundation, another group, like the Tides Foundation, that acts as a front for donors who don’t want their names tied to the organizations they fund, called donor-advised funding. The list goes on.

That Mr. Goldberg no longer works for The American Prospect, and thus, may no longer be accepting George Soros’ shilling, is a minor point that need not trouble the reader or disturb our hit-spiel, erm, narrative…. For the record, when last sighted, Mr. Goldberg was at liberty, as a free-lance journalist. I don’t know where he has been published lately (You’re right, I’m totally uninterested in finding out.)

(5) True. Ted “I’m a Socialist at heart.” Turner’s United Nations Foundation ( http://www.unfoundation.org/ ) is the only donor mentioned for the blog, UN Dispatch ( http://www.undispatch.com/index.html ), which shills for the UN. Is this to be Mr. Goldberg’s new perch? Mr. Turner’s many colorful pronouncements can be found in profusion on the web.
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There. See how easy that was. A little bit of fact, a hearty dollop of fiction, some nasty prose, all simmered in a nice vicious broth. Fun for the whole family. What a life!

How amusing to see Mark Leon Goldberg (who?) trying to win some desperately sought recognition as…what, a “journalist,” “analyst,” “pundit”(?) by lamely attempting to trash Claudia Rosett’s reporting. Just in case anyone has misunderestimated this illustrious 2003 Tufts comparative religion grad, none of whose UN apologist logorrhea appears to contain any actual reporting, he advertises his callow arrogance with the bizarre claim that Ms. Rosett “built a career slandering” Kofi Annan.

In fairness, Mr. Goldberg can hardly be expected to have followed the first 20+ years of Ms. Rosett’s career, from the time she was Book Review Editor at the WSJ through her years as Editorial Page Editor of the Asian WSJ, and on to her tenure as Moscow Bureau Chief, WSJ Editorial Board member, and regular columnist at OpinionJournal.com. Indeed, we must forgive Mr. Goldberg his ignorance of anything that happened before, oh, 2005; after all, at the time when Ms. Rosett was reporting from within shooting distance of Red Army tanks in Tiananmen Square, the eight-year-old future Mr. Goldberg was no doubt still trying to learn his left from his right – a failed project, judging by his obtusely unbalanced commentary. When Ms. Rosett was taking the government of Singapore to task for repression of free speech, Mr. Goldberg was perhaps just learning to talk. When she was covering the early stages of the war in Chechnya, he was worrying about whether someone would pick him for their team in the lunchtime kickball game on the playground. When she was investigating corruption, working conditions, and human rights abuses in the nickel mines of arctic Siberia, he was perhaps conducting a visual inspection of the sweater on the girl seated beside him in algebra class. All of this we can overlook because Mr. Goldberg was simply born too late.

But let us not forgive the insouciance with which this parasitic, self-styled “correspondent” (who has made a “career” out of, um…well, never mind) imagines that he has anything to teach Ms. Rosett about journalism. Claudia Rosett’s journalistic repertoire has covered issues that range far beyond anything even approached by Mr. Goldberg’s parroted squawkings of collectivist propaganda, and has done so with more depth and originality than Mr. Goldberg will ever fathom. What Mr. Goldberg does may have worked well enough at Tufts, but Claudia’s readers are smarter than that.

Brian:

I should state up front that I am no fan of the way that the UN operates: however I do take issue with uninformed attacks on a body that I believe has some notable successes despite the constraints it operates under. It’s therefore a pleasure to discuss these issues with somebody who has clearly thought carefully about them, rather than have to read the common kneejerk reactions that I read on many blogs, so thank you Brian.

Having said that, I will keep my comments brief and address only one of your points:

I would regard resolutions that are not enforced as bolstering tyrants, breeding corruption and victimizing the weak.

I feel that you’re criticizing the UN for not doing something that it was neither designed or authorized to do; and regard UN resolutions as pointless because they don’t achieve the aims that you want. In addition, UN resolutions are generally non-binding, so there is no enforcement mechanism; they do not have the force of law, so it is largely pointless to be disillusioned because they’re not enforced as law.

Precisely. Pigs can’t fly because they don’t have wings. They weren’t set up that way. And you assume correctly: I’d oppose in the strongest possible way the prospect of the US being subject to UN edicts. Which simply makes my point: the UN does not have the power to punish people who commit human rights abuses under its banner, because it wasn’t designed that way… Each is a “fatal design flaw,” rather like trying to construct a bridge across a river with no bottom (ever see Bridge on the River Kwai?).

This argument interests me more for what is not said than for what is said. You believe that the UN has a fatal design flaw because it doesn’t have the power do something that it wasn’t set up to do, while at the same time you agree that if it did have that power, you’d object strenuously? All bridges are designed to carry a certain load; to say that the bridge is badly designed because it collapses when twice that load is placed on it seems a little strained as an argument.

That’s my bad — if I’d had my thinking cap on, I’d have written that sentence differently. I’d have qualified it to read: “The US has the power to bring wrongdoers who misbehave under the US banner to justice and the US exercises that power.”

On that we can agree, and the justice system is one of the saving graces of the US as far as I’m concerned.