Washington Post columnist Tina Brown offered another amusing peek inside the liberal brain Thursday in the Style section, explaining how the liberals feel they must defend Kofi Annan from neocon imperialists. But by comparing him to a ventriloquist dummy? “The view in these circles all along has been, as one guest at a recent Annan dinner put it, that dumping all the blame on Kofi is ‘like Edgar Bergen…slapping Charlie McCarthy.’ The real oil-for-food scandal was the conduct of individual Security Council members, including the United States.”

She keeps at the ventriloquism metaphors: “But whatever the ominous implications of the newly disclosed Cotecna memo, nobody here can bear to think Kofi Annan could do anything truly shabby. Scapegoating him is another exercise in Republican voice-throwing — almost as skillful a deflection as when the White House pushed the blame for the Guantanamo abuses off onto…Newsweek.”

Tina says Manhattan’s corporate barracudas swarm around the “halo” of Saint Kofi: “Annan’s presence in the striving salons of Manhattan’s newly rich always lent the halo of higher purpose. They were all about money. He was all about doing good. His appearance at their tables was a kind of benediction for their evolving conscience.”

She concludes by claiming Kofi is the most pro-American UN Secretary General we’ve had, even if it’s FDR/Clinton America he reveres, not pushy Bush/Bolton America, but “in this bastion of internationalist longing there is a desire to shore him up and get him to the end of his term with his dignity intact. The Bushies have the Senate, Congress and cowed media. They can’t have Annan too.”