Move over Madeleine (and Hillary too)!

On Wednesday Condoleezza Rice joined President Bush in a visit to Wiesbaden Army Airfield in Germany. Her clothing was quite striking, projecting an image of self-assurance and determination. I don't seem to be the only one who noticed...

Should I Giggle or Cry?

While I am not quite as cynical as Mark Steyn, many things he says here and here are undeniable (as well as very well put): I just hope, against all evidence, that the Europeans will pull their acts together at some point.
By the way, make sure you take a good look at Steynonline.com: it is a treasure trove...

Where is our sense of proportion?

Among other things, first page news in Europe today include the resignation of Ruud Lubbers. I certainly do not know if the allegations are true, but even if they were, wouldn't it make sense to focus more on this (via Instapundit)? An unknown number of UN peace-keepers may have raped and abused girls in their care and we worry about whether a UN bureaucrat sexually harassed an employee with a cushy job in Geneva? Not that this is not an important issue to pursue and Lubbers should certainly be held accountable if proven guilty, but how come this:

The controversy began when a 51-year-old female administrator filed charges against Lubbers in May 2004 for grabbing her by the waist at a December 2003 meeting at the UNHCR's Geneva headquarters. She said he pressed his groin against her. (Washington Post)

is focused on more than this:

The UN has since admitted that some of its peacekeepers regularly raped, abused and prostituted children in their care. (…) The UN has known about these abuses for some time but is only now scrambling to respond to the charges. (The Age) ?

And anyway why isn't the UN peace-keepers scandal being discussed as much as Abu Ghraib scandal? Is it just because American troops are not involved?

Where is the outrage now?

If all those people who said that

• given enough time, UN weapons inspections would have worked
• that the UN sanctions imposed on Iraq should be transformed into "smart sanctions," because the conditions were too harsh
• that only the UN can lend legitimacy to international actions all over the world

really believed what they were saying; they should be outraged by this (via lgf) and this (via Michelle Malkin). And they should be vocally and insistently calling for a major overhaul of the UN. In other words, now that they have egg all over their faces (because the "UN-solutions" they championed have been discredited) they should be making realistic and effective proposals on how to change the way the world's problems are to be addressed in the future.

For some reason, however, there has not been, and I highly doubt there ever will be the same kind of outrage, outcry and flurry of reform as there was in the US intelligence community when it became clear that there had been significant miscalculations about Saddam's military capabilities.

Where is the outrage now? Where are the headlines and why aren't the photographs of the UN rape scandal splashed all over the front pages of the world's newspapers? Are most of Bush's critics really so uninterested in the truth and in dealing with the world's problems that all their criticisms are insincere: that they only make a furore if they have some hope of damaging Bush? Isn't that sad?