More Year End Recollections

Mark Steyn remembers 2005:

For all the money lavished on them, the UN is hard to rouse to action. Mr Egeland’s full-time round-the-clock 24/7 Big Humanitarians are conspicuous by their all but total absence on the ground… They’ve flown in (or nearby, or overhead) a couple of experts to assess the situation and they’ve issued press releases boasting about the assessments. In Sri Lanka, Mr Egeland’s staff informs us, “UNFPA is carrying out reproductive health assessments”. Which, translated out of UN-speak, means the Sri Lankans can go screw themselves.

So does James Lileks:

Gitmo torture tales surface again in May, as Newsweek claims that a Koran was flushed down a toilet. The story is later retracted. Did no one at Newsweek consider the difficulty of flushing a book down a commode? Probably its elitist reporters and editors have Mexican housekeepers who do all their flushing for them.

...Cindy Sheehan’s application for a mortgage on a small piece of a Texas driveway is approved. Most of the major networks are listed as co-signers.