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See, here’s the part the UN just doesn’t get…

“If we wait for the UN to tell us what to do, we wouldn’t do anything,” said Abdul Hadi bin e Rashid, first admiral of the Malaysian navy at the country’s operations tent at Banda Aceh airport.

“There are people who are hungry and angry. Why wait? So we just do it.”

If people weren’t dying, it would be like a scene from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“This is ridiculous! You don’t need a committee to invent the wheel!”

“Oh, no? All right, Mr. Smart Guy, you tell us ó what color should it be?”

I have been enjoying the Diplomad immensely and agreeing with everything they write. That’s why I really hope they are who they say they are. (On the internet no one knows you’re a very clever geek posing as a Foreign Service officer saying what much of the blogosphere wants to hear. . . . ) I expect there will be independent corroboration eventually.

“Charges of fraud and abuse in program intended to keep Iraq’s oil proceeds out of the hands of Saddam Hussein, so they could serve the needs of Iraq’s needy, have ignited considerable anger in Washington, and even calls for Mr. Annan to resign. The audits reviewed by The Times, conducted by the United Nations’ Office of Internal Oversight Services, do not contain allegations of bribery or corruption. But they do identify problems with all three of the program’s main contractors… The United Nations, however, denied allegations that the audits showed that the United Nations did not adequately monitor the program. Stephane Dujarric, a spokesman for the United Nations, said the audits showed that “this was a highly audited and supervised program.”"

Circling in? Even calls for Kofi to abdicate? Well, it is a damn fine dance whatever you call it; the NYT is leaving itself lots of room to take this story wherever it might want it to go. And there is the key. The NYPost story, like the bloggers, commits and gets to the point with some haste. No hesitation to quote the 21B bilked figure. But the NYT will defer any nastiness as if they were lawyers piling up the hours to insure no possible process is not milked to the max.

This is like the high vs. pop. culture wars in the arts that has largely ended with pop regnant, not that pop hasn’t transformed itself in the process, sometimes assimilating the old highbrow values. But, if anyone tried to create a blog with serious highbrow tones, where the Kofis of the world, whether from left or right, were given polite and lengthy deferrals of their execution, would anyone read it? Is there such a blog? Probably not.

But then why is there still an audience for the NYT? It’s not subsidized in the same way as the sympathy or the ballet. But if the advertising dried up, would the elites try to subsidize it in a similar way? Do they need it so, the paper of record?