Call him “The Interpreter.” Mark Malloch Brown, the new chief of staff to the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, was in Washington yesterday, trying to explain to Congress what to make of all the scandal and political posturing at Turtle Bay. Our Benny Avni has the particulars on Page 1. Mr. Malloch Brown made reference to a number of “troubling revelations” such as the oil for food scandal, which is under investigation by the Volcker committee, and sexual exploitation by U.N. peacekeepers in Africa and elsewhere. And according to his interpretation, what America should make of it is to stop sticking its nose in United Nations business but send more money.

We invite our readers to sit back for just a moment and try to imagine what an ordinary person is going to make of this kind of brass. An ordinary person goes home every day of his working life with the sense that the government is already taking too much in taxes. He nurses a kind of free-floating sense that the government is loose with his money, operates with a sense of entitlement, resents oversight, and will never be satisfied with the budget it is given. He picks up the evening paper or the morning edition he didn’t have time to read and encounters the latest scandal from the U.N., the latest maneuver against Israel, the latest sneer at the United States.

What is he going to make of Mr. Malloch Brown’s testimony? We don’t actually want to adopt too mocking a tone here. Mr. Malloch Brown is a high-minded man, probably the best there is in the U.N. system, full of the kind of idealism that animated the original idea of the United Nations. He represents his boss, Mr. Annan, as a man who has introduced more U.N. reforms than any of his predecessors and a leader who is intent on making changes if he can only be “given back the power to manage.” But when an ordinary person reads this kind of thing after what we have come through with the United Nations, he is just going to conclude the world body and the ordinary American are speaking two different languages.

The Congress, we sense, is way ahead of Mr. Malloch Brown. “Weariness” is the word Mr. Avni chose to characterize the reaction of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher to the latest promises of reform. Mr. Avni quotes the congressman, one of the key figures on this beat, as saying that the various United Nations-related hearings on Capitol Hill “are building up to a point where a certain reform package is going to be presented in Congress.” And that further funding – America provides 22% of the organization’s annual budget – will depend on implementation of the reform measures.

Mr. Rohrabacher is one of the most vocal critics of the U.N. in the Congress and on the International Affairs Committee. He said yesterday that America should consider whether to continue to act as a “major player” at the United Nations and perhaps reconsider its role as a host nation. We take that as a sign of realism. The fact is that the biggest lurches of reform within the U.N. system came when America withdrew from its constituent parts, first at the International Labor Organization and then at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, known as UNESCO. We would like to think that such a move is percolating in the Congress with regard to the whole United Nations.