Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

This is the latest BBC report on North Korea and world reaction.

I don’t like the government of the DPRK. I appreciated the opportunity to annoy it, and did not need the medal I received for doing it. My Dad received three medals and two unit citations for annoying the DPRK, so it’s sort of part of the “family business.”

I was in POW training when the DPRK seized the USS Pueblo, and flew the same route as the Navy EC-121 they shot down. Many of the people killed or captured did the same job in the Navy that I did in the Air Force and we all worked in NSA. It was personal, and it proved that Nixon couldn’t care less about those of us in reconnaissance.

When Michael posted Боже мой last night, I felt like Swopa expressed in Blowing up the suspended-animation crisis: this was something to have been expected.

Eric Alterman has a solid background piece on how things came to this rather nasty point; the Pensacola Beach Blogger provides more; and Terry explains the $95 million that Anarcho-capitalist and the Taliban’s favorite congressweasel, Dana Rohrabacher was complaining about earlier this morning [my time] on the BBC’s The World Today.

Michael provides coverage of that segment of the program in his post, The Republicans are fabulists, which I would love for all Americans to have heard so they could understand what whackos they elect to represent them.

Michael apparently missed the later segment on the BBC with Joseph Cirincione, an actual expert on non-proliferation issues who managed to explain all of the missteps that the Shrubbery has made. In a nutshell, look at what has happened to the three nations that the Shrubbery defined as the “Axis of Evil”: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The threat from all three has risen at an alarming rate since they became targets of this administration.

Mr. Cirincione makes the point that this will probably result in a local arms race, as none of the people in the area are comfortable with depending on the US. An expression of their discomfort will probably be evident in the coming UN resolution that will probably not contain anything that could be used as a casus belli by the US. Nations no longer trust the US to act reasonably.

The new prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, will probably push harder than ever to rebuild the Japanese military to its “former glory” and South Korea will probably start looking at nuclear weapons “research.”

Kim Jong Il is an easy target: world’s worst Elvis impersonator, world’s worst comb-over, platform shoes so thick he gets nose bleeds…

The miniscule cretin also has a million-man army, thousands of artillery pieces within range of Seoul, missiles, fighter-bombers, thousands of tanks, etc. He is mentally unstable. Face it: he makes Woody Allen seem like the Dalai Lama in comparison. This is not someone you threaten because it should be obvious to anyone that he will respond to threats with violence. He has lived his entire life in the shadow of his father, Kim Il Sung, and can never attain the power and stature his father had in North Korea, almost the equivalent of a god, but he would like to.

Do you feel safer?