Um, HELL-O?!?! Was I sleeping? When did the U.N. decide to make Libya the chair of the U.N. Human Rights Commission and Iraq the chair of a disarmament conference??? "When did Saruman the Wise abandon reason for madness?!" Rex Murphy, I hope you're lying. I will have to do some investigating.

In the meantime, you can all savour Rex's delicious rhetoric on these, um, painfully ironic appointments:

There are many reasons why Mr. Bush might not think highly of the UN. The most recent one might be the elevation of Libya to the chairmanship of the UN Human Rights Commission and the pending elevation of Iraq to the chairmanship of a conference on disarmament. We might think that such flamboyant reaches after absurdity and hypocrisy were the dreams of some manic sitcom, were they not all too real. An institution that can find a place for Libya to head the scrutiny of the world's human-rights abuses has wandered so far into Nineteen Eighty-Four country that it's emerged in Kafkaland.