Pundita: Eric Shawn interviews John Batchelor today on Fox News, which reminds me that Barack Obama is a fan of Mark Malloch-Brown

Pundita writes this morning on her blog:

Journalist and Fox News senior correspondent/anchor Eric Shawn (left) talked with John Batchelor (right) about GITMO on Fox News Sunday (11:20 am ET).

John has appeared frequently on Eric’s show and vice versa. Eric is immortalized for John’s listeners as “Guy in Truck” because of his reporting on United Nations antics from a Fox News truck stationed outside UN headquarters.

Between their own reporting on the United Nations and their regular appearances on John’s original show, which aired five nights a week, Eric Shawn and Claudia Rosett (right) exposed the machinations of the biggest collection of scoundrels this side of Mordor.

Let me tell you that Mark Malloch-Brown (left) — that’s “Sir” Mark to you — was none too pleased about the muckraking. A month after the publication of Eric Shawn’s 2006 book, The U.N. Exposed: How the United Nations Sabotages America’s Security and Fails the World, Sir Mark studiously avoided mention of the book but publicly complained that the good works of the U.N. were 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.”

“The U.N.’s role is in effect a secret in Middle America even as it is highlighted in the Middle East and other parts of the world,” Malloch Brown said.

Well! The UN role certainly wasn’t a secret in the parts of Middle America that tuned to John Batchelor’s show and kept up with the reporting of Eric and Claudia. Then again, Middle America is not bright enough to grasp the nuances of the UN’s good work — and neither is Claudia, I might add:

In February 2006 Mark Malloch Brown, then the UN Secretary General’s chief of staff, was interviewed by Claudia Rosett at the UN, and found himself increasingly furious at the line of questioning about his housing arrangements in New York. Malloch Brown had caused controversy with his decision to live on the smart country estate of George Soros, the financier who forced Britain out of the ERM in 1992, and a major donor to left-wing causes. Finally, the UN mandarin barked that he was doing ‘God’s work’ before storming out of the interview.

What a collection of characters we Americans have wrought by our intentions to do good in the world. Sir Mark, while he was Kofi Annan’s deputy at the United Nations:

[...] distinguished himself by spinning away the $100 billion Oil for Food scandal as little more than a blip in the U.N.’s good work, and one that had little to do with Mr. Annan himself. [...] “Not a penny was lost from the organization,” he insisted [...] following an audit of the U.N.’s peacekeeping procurement by its Office of Internal Oversight Services.

In fact, the office found that $7 million had been lost from overpayment; $50 million worth of contracts showed indications of bid rigging; $61 million had bypassed U.N. rules; $82 million had been lost to mismanagement; and $110 million had “insufficient” justification. That’s $310 million out of a budget of $1.6 billion, and who knows what the auditors missed.

But of course President-select Barack Obama is bright enough to grasp the nuances, which clearly is why he is a fan of Sir Mark, who after his tenure at the UN went on to become Britain’s Minister for Africa, Asia and the United Nations. In February 2008, Samantha Power revealed that Obama came to admire Sir Mark while he was deputy secretary-general of the United Nations:

“He was really taken with him,” says Power, in what will undoubtedly be viewed by American conservatives as a desperately bad sign. “It’s a relationship that has persisted and they have talked a number of times since.”

I do not think that conservatives should be the only ones to feel alarm. The British have been screwing around in Africa and Asia for how many centuries? And they’ve gone from making mess to mess. As such, Sir Mark and his sorry work at the United Nations are an advertisement for everything wrong with Britain’s attempts to play God. If he’s now to be joined by an American President with a God complex, that’s another way of describing the road to Hell.

But enough bad news. John Batchelor notes on his blog that Cuba’s good climate and the exercise regimen and healthy diet at GITMO have worked wonders for mass murderer Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s appearance.

A note about John’s show on WABC: If you’ve recently gotten no sound or wall-to-wall advertisements when you’ve tuned into WABC online to listen to John Bachelor’s Sunday show, that has to do with football. WABC airs New York Jets games, which sometimes bumps John’s show. Here’s the Jets schedule.

I think tonight’s Batchelor show will air in full on WABC but for future reference, the workaround is to listen to the first two hours of the New York portion of the show on Washington, DC’s WMAL radio online, then either pick up the podcast for the third hour the next day at John’s website, or listen to the online KSFO rebroadcast of the show on Sunday night from 10:00 PM – 1:00 AM Eastern Time (7:00 – 10:00 PM Pacific Time).

As I’ve mentioned before the KSFO show out of San Francisco is not the one that airs in the same time slot on Los Angeles KFI radio; John’s Sunday show is bicoastal: the first three hours from New York’s WABC and affiliates WMAL and KSFO radio; the second three hours from KFI out of Los Angeles.