There You Go Again, George

Pooh on You, North Korea!

Today our president, our opportunistic commander in chief, proved once again that his inflexible ideology and his unwillingness to face reality are endangering the nation's security. With wailing sirens in the background (staged by Carl Rove, perhaps, for the fear effect) he outlined a rehash of his failed strategy to contain North Korea in a news conference at the embattled White House.

Again, he flatly refused to consider direct negotiations with Pyongyang (a word he has trouble pronouncing) and showed his contempt for ground-breaking negotiates with the reclusive nation at the end of the Clinton Administration. There's no hard evidence Clinton's deal with North Korea to halt nuclear fuel development, if coupled with stringent monitoring, would not have worked in the long run and prevented Kim Jong Il from testing his first little atom bomb.

Rather, there is every indication that the president undermined that historic step in successful diplomatic engagement with North Korea simply because it gave credit to the Clinton administration. The resulting dialogue with "punyong" has been an unmitigated disaster, worsened rather than facilitated by the mamby pamby six-party talks format - constructed to mask the brainless rejection of direct talks by our macho leader and his darkly whispering neo-con advisers -dipl0matic amateurs all.

Yes, I'm beginning to sound a little like a Democratic partisan, maybe even a KCNA mouthpiece. But I speak as a loyal critic, out of loyalty to our flawed democracy's best interests in national security, not to this tragically misguided administration. It doesn't really matter whether this morass was created by a Republican or a Democratic in the White House. But this irrational brinksmanship happens to be the handiwork of an irresponsible leader, who raised the odds of South Korea's capital being incinerated by conventonal rockets, not nukes, and who may take his party down with his ill repute in November.
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