WHO is at it again

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour tweeted “Defunding the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic is like pulling the plug on firefighters in the aftermath of 9/11.”  Really?  Perhaps Ms. Amanpour’s liberal ideology got in the way of rational thought.

I’m sure Ms. Amanpour thought she delivered a pithy analogy; but Miriam-Webster defines analogy as “something that’s comparable to something else in significant respects.’’ And by that definition the actions of the FDNY on 9/11 could be defined as – Heroic!   However, should we really call  an organization “heroic”  that had just announced publicly there was no indication of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 despite reports and clear evidence to the contrary?  And just how “heroic” was it to praise the Chinese for deceiving the world and concealing information about the origins of the outbreak?

A more accurate analogy would be Trump’s strategy of threatening to pull the U.S. out of NATO if the member nations didn’t start living up to their financial agreements.  Every president since George H. W. Bush has begged the member nations of NATO to ‘pony up’ without success until Trump.  NATO’s military spending still doesn’t meet what was promised, but it has increased significantly.  Sometimes a stick is more effective than a carrot!

And not to belabor the point, but since when is it efficacious to reward bad behavior?  I doubt Ms. Amanpour gave her kids additional privileges when they broke curfew or if she praised the family dog when it chewed up the upholstery on her living room sofa.  So why is it OK to continue to reward the World Health Organization with millions more dollars in the face of its obvious China bias?  How does that benefit the billions of people who were deceived by yet another UN related organization?

There’s an old expression, “close enough for government work,” which is an idiomatic, humorous, and disparaging way of saying that something isn’t worth investing the time to do correctly.  For example:  “The fence posts aren’t quite perpendicular, but they’re close enough for government work.”  Ms. Amanpour’s tweet might, and I say “might” be forgiven if it was discovered that simple incompetence or lackadaisical attitudes were at play—but that wasn’t the case—this was a matter of pre-meditated deception and illustrates how once again agencies of the United Nations operate with their own agendas to the detriment of the United States.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that once an entity with an agenda, such as the World Health Organization, having committed itself publicly to an idea, has little incentive to admit they were wrong and every incentive to minimize any subsequent negative outcomes.  By ‘pulling the plug’ on the funding the president is simply following the tried and true business practice of holding an organization accountable for its actions.

It’s human nature to put one’s own agenda before someone else’s.  And while that may seem obvious, we should find it curious how so many people fail to recognize that fact when it comes to THE most politically dishonest organization in the world, the United Nations, and believe its bureaucrats and those of the organizations under its auspices such as WHO, actually have their (the people’s) best interest at heart.

Quote of the day: “A man will fight harder for his self-interests than his rights.”  Napoleon Bonaparte