And in a parallel universe . . . .

President Vladimir Putin today appointed Kerkita B. Gulagov as Russia’s new ambassador to the United Nations. Gulagov, a hardened veteran of the cold war and chief architect of the occupation of Afghanistan, is a long-time critic of the U.N.’s “unacceptable bias in favor of the United States and its imperialist objectives.” President Putin observed that Gulagov has the perfect personality to pursue reforms at the United Nations, where he will work on eliminating the world body’s unjust interference in Russia’s “purely internal security issues,” such as peacekeeping and anti-terrorism efforts in Chechnya and elsewhere. Putin expects Gulagov’s aggressive, combative personality to “shake things up” at the moribund U.N. and “bring it into the 21st century.” Another of Gulagov’s goals, according to Putin, will be to eliminate the United States’ veto power on the Security Council. Putin concluded by emphasizing that “I'm sending Ambassador Gulagov to New York with my complete confidence.”

Asked for President Bush’s reaction to Gulagov’s appointment, Press Secretary Scott McClelland responded: “No biggy. We don’t care much about the U.N. anyway. We have shown definitively that multilateralism is dead in today’s world.”