Crossposted from my blog.

Since there is a five-minutes recess in the threat-making against Iran, the fulminating fascist John Bolton gets off by threatening the United Nations, FOX News reports:

[US ambassador to the UN John] Bolton called Tuesday’s speech by Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown a “very, very grave mistake” that could undermine Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s efforts to push through an ambitious agenda at the world body.

[snip]

“To have the deputy secretary-general criticize the United States in such a manner can only do grave harm to the United Nations,” Bolton said. “Even though the target of the speech was the United States, the victim, I fear, will be the United Nations.”

Uh-oh. Is another tall building in NY about to turn into debris? Or merely lose ten stories? Clearly something earth-shattering has occurred:

“I spoke to the secretary-general this morning, I said ‘I’ve known you since 1989 and I’m telling you this is the worst mistake by a senior U.N. official that I have seen in that entire time,”‘ Bolton told reporters on Wednesday.

The. Worst. Mistake. By a senior UN official. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall! In other words, a very very very grave mistake — worse than the Oil-for-Food scandal, and the surrender of Srebrenica to General Mladic, and the failure to investigate the sexual abuse by UN Peacekeepers of impoverished Congolese kids.

That must have been some speech.

So what dynamite did it contain? An unconditional endorsement of bin Laden? A call to assassinate Bush? Or perhaps it was personal; say, an unfavorable comparison of Bolton’s moustache to Nietzsche’s, or of his harassment skills to those of his old buddy Clarence Thomas?

No. No, it was something else:

In the speech, Malloch Brown said the United States relies on the United Nations as a diplomatic tool but doesn’t defend it against criticism at home, a policy of “stealth diplomacy” that he called unsustainable.

He lamented that the good works of the U.N. are largely lost because “much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.”

And the absolute lowest blow, we are told, was this:

U.S. officials, including Bolton, said they were especially upset that Malloch Brown, a Briton, mentioned “Middle America.”

Bolton said Malloch Brown’s “condescending, patronizing tone about the American people” was the worst part about the speech.

“Fundamentally and very sadly, this was a criticism of the American people, not the American government, by an international civil servant,” Bolton said. “It’s just illegitimate.”

A reference to ‘Middle America’ was a graver mistake than Srebrenica and puts the future of the UN at risk.

I am sure this makes perfect sense — if you just happen to be psychotic like, say, John Bolton.