When will we stop funding the UN?

Collin Levey nails the hypocrisy and uselessness that characterizes the UN. I'm just quoting bits and pieces of her column here, but I urge you to read the whole thing:

THE new leadership of the U.N. Human Rights Commission calls to mind an old story: Told that the World Bank would be holding a conference on corruption in his country, a Cambodian official joked: 'Why -- to learn how to do it better?' Recently elected to this year's Human Rights Commission 'action panel' were Cuba and Zimbabwe. So the regimes of two of the world's top rights abusers -- Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro -- will now help decide which human-rights complaints will get a U.N. hearing. Castro's most recent roundup of political dissidents merely restocked his island's now-famous prisons. Mugabe's abuses are producing a famine in his once-food-exporting nation -- and now he's effectively banned foreign human-rights workers from his country, by banning foreign funding of their work.

As Levey points out, these repressive regimes have gone beyond protecting each other, and now are working simply to stick it to America (which, although Levey does not say so, practically supports that corrupt institution):

No kidding. The world's most flagrant rights abusers typically vote as a bloc in favor of letting each other off the hook. In the most recent sessions, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Sudan, China, Egypt and Nigeria joined together reliably to exonerate whichever government was being accused. But lately there may be an added motive, even for countries with decent human-rights records: Sticking a finger in America's eye.

Levey points out that large numbers of the Human Rights Commission member countries do not even pay minimal lip service to any human rights, or to the treaty underlying their own commission:

Not all countries have a right to sit in judgment of their neighbors. Human Rights Watch has argued that, at the very least, members of the commission should be required to have signed human-rights treaties, and have demonstrated some basic level of respect for the principle. Freedom House, which scores countries according to political freedoms, last year noted that 13 members — a quarter of the commission — ranked as either "repressive" or "not free," representing the very bottom of the barrel worldwide. Reporters Without Borders has duly observed that nearly half — 25 — haven't even ratified the human-rights treaties they're supposedly charged with enforcing.

Level wraps up with a scathing indictment of the nature of the UN (and the reason I think we ought to get rid of that grotesque institution altogether):

A simple fact of numbers at the United Nations is that the brutal and uncivilized countries of the world have the power to dominate discussions and prevent reform. That's because at the moment, U.N. membership bestows the same legitimacy on countries that live up to mankind's greatest ideals and those who make manifest the darkest horrors of human nature.

The fact is, the great UN experiment has failed. It's time to admit defeat and pull the plug. And the United States, which holds the checkbook, has the power, unilaterally to do just that.