“The little councilman in New York.” That’s how Bruce S. Gelb, a member of the United Nations Development Corporation, is referring to Simcha Felder, the 6-foot-tall Democrat who was elected to represent the people of Brooklyn. Mr. Gelb, so far as we can tell, has never been elected to any public office, though he was appointed by President George H.W. Bush as ambassador to Belgium. Mr. Gelb spent most of his career as a business executive, much of it at the hair-care products company Clairol.

In sneering at a democratically elected representative of the voters, Mr. Gelb displays remarkably undiplomatic behavior for a member of the board of a state authority, not to mention a former diplomat. He assumes, moreover, some of the characteristics of the United Nations itself. His outburst is likely to be counterproductive. And it’s telling, for as Mr. Gelb and his colleagues pour money into preparations for building an extravagant new headquarters for United Nations bureaucrats, it is not only their words that signal a contempt for the people of New York, it is their actions.

These columns take a back seat to no one in our willingness to criticize the city council. Our criticisms have been directed toward the council’s profligacy with the taxpayers’ money, its resolution against liberating Iraq, and its eagerness to vote its members more money in the name of campaign finance “reform.” In the case of the concern about the United Nations, the council members are trying to defend the taxpayer and the ordinary New Yorker who reads about and occasionally sees what goes on in Turtle Bay and asks why, in the midst of a historic budget crisis when billions more are going to be asked for schools and highways and mass transit, he should be forced yet again to help fund a world body that is against America in the war on terror.

Defenders of the United Nations expansion leap to cite the allegedly huge number of jobs the world body brings to New York. Poppycock. If the issue is how to create jobs in New York, the way to do it is cut tax rates on the top margins. That’s the policy approach that correlates to job growth.

“It strikes me,” Mr. Gelb harrumphed to our Meghan Clyne, “that there’s some relationship between the president of the United States signing a bill and the real world, far more than four state senators who don’t happen to have a constituent group that likes everything about the United Nations.” The UNDC director was referring to Senators Padavan, Golden, Maltese, and Marchi. The fact is that these four senators have to account for state funding to the voters. So they may yet have the last word on who is and isn’t connected to reality.