The Council and Morales

As if New York's City Council weren't already a complete laughingstock, busy allocating millions of dollars to nonexistent organizations so the money could be used as a political slush fund for the Council speaker, the body yesterday extended its official welcome to an anti-American South American strongman, President Morales of Bolivia. True to form, Mr. Morales used the platform provided by the City Council's Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus to denounce America, claiming that the American ambassador at La Paz is "at the head" of what he called a "conspiracy" against him and his people. It would be nice to think that were so. Mr. Morales deserves to be driven from office, and so do the three City Council members who stood by him yesterday, John Liu, Robert Jackson, and Melissa Mark-Viverito.

As if it weren't bad enough that Bolivia is exporting cocaine to addict New York youth and seduce them into lives of crime, Mr. Morales has embraced the terror-sponsoring government of Iran. Pressed about the issue in an interview with Al-Jazeera, he whitewashed the murderous record of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, claiming, "While the Bush administration sends troops to kill people, Iran for example, does not." So much for the Jews killed in Argentina by the Iranians, or the Iranian agents casing the New York City subways. Or the American troops killed by Iranian bombs in Iraq. Mr. Morales has welcomed Iran's Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to La Paz, where the two issued a joint statement defending Iran's nuclear program. If Council Speaker Quinn can't rein in these sorts of shenanigans, her political future is going to confront even bigger obstacles than the slush fund scandal.