President George W. Bush on Iraq (9/19/02):

At the United Nations Security Council, it is very important that the members understand that the credibility of the United Nations is at stake, that the Security Council must be firm in its resolve to deal with a true threat to world peace — and that is Saddam Hussein. But the United Nations Security Council must work with the United States and Britain and other concerned parties to send a clear message that we expect Saddam to disarm.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Iran (4/27/06):

“In order to be credible, the Security Council, of course, has to act,” Rice told reporters at a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting.

The point, of course, is that the U.N.’s credibility is solely derived from doing whatever it is that the Bush administration wants. Since the predictability and hypocrisy ships have both long since sailed, all I can really do is bang my head on the table. The ideas shaken free by this exercise are two:

New press secretary Tony Snow should have brought along a thesaurus so at least it would have been more difficult for me to remember and then Google the ’02 quote.

Is anyone else getting a mental image of Colin Powell‘s Pavlovian self-flagellation anytime he hears the words “credibility” and “United Nations” in the same sentence?