The 90% Club - WSJ.com

The 90% Club - WSJ.com: "Whenever somebody gets a suspiciously large share of a vote, we tend to cock an eyebrow. So forgive us for not feeling wholly at ease with the margin -- 86.9%, to be exact -- by which the U.N.'s General Assembly recently voted to give the United States its first-ever seat on the Human Rights Council.

In this case, the election was uncontested, since the U.S., along with Belgium and Norway, were the only candidates to fill the three available seats in their shared geographical group, known as 'Western European and Others.' In theory the U.S. could have lost by failing to get a simple majority, but that wasn't likely given that President Obama went conspicuously out of his way to join a body that President Bush had boycotted."

Then there's the matter of the company the U.S. now gets to keep on the Council: Cuba, China, Cameroon, Russia and Saudi Arabia also took seats on the Human Rights Council, never mind that Freedom House rates all of them as "not free." The margins by which they won were, typically, only slightly below the margins to which they are accustomed in their own domestic "elections." Call these regimes the 90% club.

Following the vote, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice acknowledged that the Council was a "flawed body that has not lived up to its potential." That's one way of describing an organization whose achievements include laying the groundwork for the recent "anti-racism" conference at which Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounced Israel. Ms. Rice went on to add that while some of the Council's human-rights records were sub-par, "we have not been perfect ourselves." That's the kind of moral equivalence that has helped make the Human Rights Council what it is.