Sadly, I can’t come up with a clever post title for this event, but it seems to be generally confirmed that North Korea has detonated a .5 to 1.5 kiloton nuclear device, for which it is receiving universal condemnation.
Bruce the Veep suggests laying this one at the feet of our previous President (that would be Bill Clinton) for agreeing to permit North Korea to proceed with “peaceful” nuclear research (the kind that Iran says it wants to pursue now) back in the 1990’s, rather than take on North Korea then and there (a North Korea that then did not have nuclear weapons). I would say that that’s not all that unfair, although we cannot by any means discount that the current President’s “Axis of EvilTM” program has certainly encouraged North Korea to get on with their nuclear development as fast as possible to head off American aggression. (In fact, it seems to have been a successful policy, as there are not only no plans vis a vis attacking North Korea, but we are diverting USA troops from the South Korean DMZ to Iraq and have launched an Armada heading for Iran, both of which, unlike North Korea, lack nuclear weapons.) Further, Bush the Younger has been in office for nearly six years, and hasn’t really seemed to even articulate a policy towards North Korea, other than to pull troops out of South Korea, and insist that discussion with the Hermit Kingdom be in the form of multi-party talks (thereby minimizing American accountability).
In short… whatever Clinton’s policies were, they seem to have been unchanged in any material sense by the Iraq-obsessed Bush team, especially since the discovery on Bush’s watch that North Korea was violating the earlier deal and developing weapons (which puts Bush into that “last clear chance” scenario, and arguably gets Clinton off the hook!). No matter: the Bushmen regard this latest… development… as an opportunity! Now they can get tough (for a change!), and as Bruce the Veep notes, encourage the North Koreans to start blackmailing the rest of the world as soon as possible. The essence of Bush the Younger’s policies: when our policies create lemons… sell it as lemonade!
Assuming we had any money left, this might also be a great time to flush hundreds of billions of more dollars down the toilet developing an anti-ballistic missile system to combat those extremely effective and accurate (LOL) North Korean Taepodong missiles (which will likely destroy Pyongyang long before they destroy anything else). But, of course, we’ve shot our wad on the Bush family pissing contest in Iraq, and drowned our government’s ability to do anything in the bathtub of tax cuts (wouldn’t it be amusingly ironic, btw, if Grover Norquist drowned in a bathtub? That’s a JOKE, folks… )
Anyway, you get the picture: North Korea has a nuclear bomb now (or in the range of a dozen, as is widely believed) and there’s precious little we can do about it.
The irony, as I just got a flash e-mail from MSNBC, is that because this event takes Foley and Iraq off the front pages, it will help the Republicans. We all knew that OBL was the most effective GOP campaign device ever invented (and I understand that OBL keeps a thank you note from RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman on the wall of his cave)… but who knew Kim Jong Il was on the team?
It seems that, as usual, we all misunderestimated Bush Junior: like Bush Pere, it seems, he too was able to assemble a vast international coalition. When it comes to marshalling some of the world’s most dangerous people into taking actions that will get Republicans elected, it seems that in the end, he truly is a uniter, not a divider.
tdog
Recent Comments