Top U.N. official calls U.S. taxpayers deadbeats

From and editorial in Investor's Business Daily about recent comments made by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon:

In a private meeting with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the secretary-general called America a "deadbeat" nation because U.S. taxpayers have been slow in chucking out another billion dollars in dues.

The U.S. ponies up some 22% of the nearly $5 billion U.N. budget. We also host that body's gaggle of diplomats in the cosmopolitan capital of the world, New York City, where they can dine, philander and double-park (via VIP license plates) in high style.

Yet after giving them all that, and after hearing their never-ending attacks against the U.S., our economic freedoms and our near-unilateral military efforts to fight terrorism in the world, we also get subjected to insults and name-calling for being late with the money.

As described by the Associated Press, when Ban was asked if he had actually used the word "deadbeat," the U.N. chief answered, " 'Yes, I did — I did,' then laughed mischievously."

With liberal Democrats in power in both the White House and Congress, Ban can afford to laugh; he and the U.N.'s Third World majority are confident that in the coming years no John Bolton or Jeane Kirkpatrick will be holding them to much account.

No one will invite the U.N. to relocate, as Kirkpatrick deputy Charles Lichtenstein famously did a quarter-century ago, with the assurance that the U.S. mission "will be down at the dockside waving you a fond farewell as you sail off into the sunset."

Read the full editorial at the newspaper's Web site.