Lines of the day

In his NRO Impromptus column, Jay Nordlinger quotes a paragraph from a message sent to him by NR senior editor and former Dartmouth Professor Jeffrey Hart:

The present-day attacks on Jefferson are part of the pathology of dysphemizing America’s heroes and its past in behalf of a variety of interests. All the more reprehensibly are such dysphemizers rewarded by the general culture. The claim that Lincoln was a homosexual gets more attention than his Second Inaugural, even though he did write the Second Inaugural and was not a homosexual.

In his Best of the Web Today column at OpinionJournal, James Taranto writes links to a Washington Post article under the heading “Kofi gets tough”:

“Secretary General Kofi Annan on Monday will propose establishing new rules for the use of military force, adopting a tough anti-terrorism treaty that would punish suicide bombers, and overhauling the United Nation’s discredited human rights commission, according to a confidential draft of a report on U.N. reform,” the Washington Post reports from Turtle Bay.
The Post doesn’t say what sort of punishment Annan is proposing for suicide bombers. Presumably the death penalty wouldn’t pass the “global test,” and in any case it would be redundant. ScrappleFace.com suggests prison, but the space between the bars would have to be really narrow to hold in the smithereens. Maybe he can arrange for them to be met in paradise by 72 U.N. peacekeepers?

While we’re in Kofi’s neighborhood, let’s also turn to Mark Steyn’s column commending President Bush’s nomination of John Bolton as America’s Ambassador to the United Nations:

Most of the American media are equally stunned [by the appointment of Bolton as the spokesmen of “the international community” are]. The New York Times wondered what Bush’s next appointment would be:
“Donald Rumsfeld to negotiate a new set of Geneva conventions? Martha Stewart to run the Securities and Exchange Commission?”
OK, I get the hang of this game. Sending Bolton to be U.N. ambassador is like…putting Sudan and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission. Or letting Saddam’s Iraq chair the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Or sending a bunch of child-sex fiends to man U.N. operations in the Congo. And the Central African Republic. And Sierra Leone, and Burundi, Liberia, Haiti, Kosovo, and pretty much everywhere else.

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