The U.S. has good reason to doubt the suitability of Rodrigues-Birkett, who with good reason appears likely to get China's endorsement.
Page A2From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 29 September 2026
Same outlet runs three columns demanding the UN's death same day, evidence: unpaid parking tickets.
As it ran on the front
The U.N. General Assembly adjourned Friday. By Tuesday the Washington Examiner had run three separate columns demanding the institution's death, and The Hill had run a fourth on who shouldn't be allowed to run what's left of it.
First: "Kick the U.N. out of New York — and build a museum of socialism in its place." The case for evicting an international body from New York: unpaid parking tickets, untipped maître d's, and what the column calls a deeply venomous hatred of the United States. That is the entire docket. Parking fines and rude tipping, filed next to a museum groundbreaking.…
…(cont) Second, same paper, same day: "Defund the monster: Why America must kill the United Nations." Different vocabulary. Same conclusion the first column had already reached with a parking fine instead of a citation.
Third, same paper, same day: "China uses capitalism to save communism. What's Washington's excuse?" This column never mentions the U.N. at all. It is the Examiner's own anxiety about which economic system is winning, dressed as a question of principle.
Fourth: The Hill worries the next secretary-general might be "a shill for China, Cuba and Hamas." Three governments, and still not one of them is the actual complaint. The actual complaint is still the parking tickets from column one.
Four columns, two outlets, one day, one destination: evict it, defund it, kill it, or staff its top job with someone who could pass a background check the first three columns never ran on their own argument. That is not four writers independently arriving at the same emergency on the same Tuesday. That is an editorial page that had the conclusion first and spent the morning finding four doors into it — and the only hard evidence produced against the United Nations, in four tries, is a stack of unpaid parking tickets.
“Three columns from the same paper, same day, all landing on "kill the UN" — that's not three writers waking up mad, that's an assignment sheet. Notice nobody's evidence is a policy, it's a parking fine, like the whole institution owes the city for a broken meter. When one paper needs three different writers to sell one eviction notice, ask who wrote the notice first and just handed out bylines.”
“Look, the U.N.'s had it coming for decades — the League of Nations couldn't stop anything either, so history's basically repeating, that's not opinion, that's pattern recognition. And sure, maybe centering the whole argument on unpaid parking tickets isn't our strongest showing — did I say "our"? That's not what I meant to defend.”
The receipts
What is the philosophical nature of fence-riding? At bottom, it is opportunism dressed up as pragmatism — a calculated willingness to bend principle when the payoff outweighs the cost of consistency. China and the United States have arrived at this posture by very different roads, and together they reveal some clues about where the world…
The U.N. General Assembly adjourned Friday, leaving behind a trail of unpaid parking tickets, untipped maitre D’s, and the stench of its deeply venomous hatred for the United States and our allies. It’s nothing new.
Just as the League of Nations collapsed because of its structural impotence and inability to prevent global conflict, its successor, the United Nations, is moving toward a similar end. The U.N. is failing.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.