Your Tax Dollars at Work: UN Literary Lion Goofs Off

The UN's Minister of Propaganda, Shashi Tharoor, had a higher priority than prepping for the UN's widely ignored 60th Anniversary procedings. That priority was, of course, Shashi Tharoor. So says the UNInsider newsletter, which chronicles the latest nonfeasance of the UN bureuacrat, whose massively overstaffed Department of Public Information is best known for organizing anti-Israel hate-fests featuring anti-Semites and for giving cushy freelance gigs to sleazy UN correspondents.

The Insider goes on to post the following rhetorical questions:

Which is more important: the 60th anniversary commemoration by the General Assembly of the U.N. Charter, or the launching of a book by Kofi Annan's aide Shashi Tharoor? Why would the head of the "U.N. Department of Public Information and Communications" hardly bother with mobilizing delegates in time for an official celebration, but make every effort to ensure that every delegate had received notice of his signing a new book on Union Square, New York? Does Mr. Tharoor's book represent the position of the U.N. Secretary General, as rules and regulations stipulate, or is it his own free wheeling set of views? How come the head of one of the largest departments has time to produce so many books, and isn't that done at the expense of staff management and staff morale? Is he entitled to use his U.N. title to promote a personal venture? How come the launching coincided with a DPI gathering of editors of main international newspapers? Did he clear the material of the book with the Department of Administration and Management, Office of Human Resources, as stated in staff rules? Is there any accountability for failure to deliver a work program while advancing one's own agenda? Questions abound. But then, whom would you ask?

Well, I suppose you can ask is the U.S. Congress, which is debating what to do about UN dues. Member state tax dollars, after all, pay this loafer's salary. The US share for the East River Debating and Terrorist Cheerleading Society is about $330 million out of a humungous total budget of $1.5 billion. Time for the UN shedding some of its extra fat, of which the eminently expendable Tharoor is only the most arrogant, in-your-face example.