When I first saw the headlines about Secretary of State John Kerry’s latest threat to Israel I wondered if Kerry had finally lost all connection to reality. Based on predecessor Hillary Clinton’s experience, the office would seem to do that to people. “Kerry Tells Israel To Pick Being Democratic Or Jewish — ‘It Cannot Be Both.’”

No, Kerry wasn’t saying you can’t be a Jew and support the Democratic Party – it was democracy in general he was talking about. Oh…

But you know, given the machinations of the Obama administration in its twilight hours, no ultimatum would be too severe or bizarre that it couldn’t escape from the asylum.

There are strong reasons to see Obama’s hand in this recent UN Security Council vote to condemn Israel’s “occupation” of geography that it won in the 1967 Six Day War – a war that was supposed to annihilate Israel; a war that Israel’s Arab “neighbors” conspired to wage with overwhelming military odds; a war where Israel took on all comers and handily defeated all of its overconfident and supercilious foes.

So, with the Arab world still largely decrying the existence of miniscule Israel, the UN Insecurity Council votes 14-0 in favor of an anti-Israel motion that should have found far more detractors than it did. And the United States, exercising the sort of diplomatic cowardice that has defined its UN posture under Obama, abstained.

Shame on this president and shame on this pussilanimous secretary of state who hasn’t had an independent thought or a creative impulse since he has occupied the top diplomatic post in the U.S.

President-elect Donald Trump has aimed a few blows at the UN over the last year but, as a man who has lived his entire life in a private sector that is remote from the worst outrages of government, he probably doesn’t have a visceral comprehension of just how brutally inefficient, blindingly ineffective and brazenly corrupt this multinational blight really is. The best way to describe the UN is to envision this flaccid but grasping organization as a universal extension of big government and sort of the welfare state writ large.

It doesn’t prevent wars or ameliorate conflict and thank God it doesn’t possess the political authority to do so because an organization dominated by authoritarian governments could be sucking even more tax dollars out of U.S. citizens and spending more money on fruitless phantasms of radical environmental policy.

So why do we persist in propping up this malignant beast?

The security council, which carelessly stumbles through debates and recklessly passes profoundly stupid motions, is a dictator’s club: for decades it has been dominated by third-world governments that are accustomed to oppressing their own populations and think themselves well-disposed to focus their undemocratic energies on other parts of the world.

When Trump delivered his “Second Gettysburg Address” in the last election campaign, nothing stoked the fires of voter emancipation more than his promise to stop sending money to the UN so that it could keep shoveling it into the bottomless pit of the climate change agenda.

Trump is promising that things will be different after Jan. 20. Let’s hope he remembers that. The UN might be nothing but a mirage, an empty promise of a better tomorrow and an enduring threat of tyrannical world government, but it casts a heinous spell on world leaders who become entrapped in its progressive mythology and powerful mystique.

It is time to move beyond these mendacious mists and call the UN what it really is: a parasitical failure.

Follow David on Twitter @DavidKrayden