George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 as a unifier.  The Democrat Left demonstrated ferociously in the Florida Insurrection that they had no intention of being reconciled to his rule.  The ensuing eight years have been among the most sustainedly acromonious and divisive in American history.

Now along comes Barack Obama posing, ironically enough, under the same “unity” motif.  Only he does so as the nominee of the party that has spent the last generation poisoning the well of political discourse, and left behind his “bringing America together” pretense months ago.

Florida 2000 was a war in everything but actual flying bullets.  2004 made that look like a Leo Buscaglia seminar.  And now?  The latest Republican nominee pulls an election-changing trump card out of his sleeve - an actual, gen-u-ine classical feminist in the immediate wake of his opponent’s conspicuous rejection of the “Feminist Pope” - and she and her family are descended upon by the Enemy Media like a pack of rabid wolves.  Doubtless to be followed up by an even more vicious domestic campaign “insurgency”.

A precious few have taken note of the trend, and are filled with more than a little foreboding as to where it is headed:

I don’t like the new media war. I don’t like what it has the potential to do to the election, and the country.

The media overstepped. The Republican party resented it. GOP strategists saw a unifying force rising: anger in the base. They too had seen this movie before. They slammed the media. The media shot back: “You’re attacking us for doing our job!”

How did the media overstep? By offending people by going so immediately and so personally into issues surrounding Mrs. Palin’s family. They did not overstep by digging, by deep reporting, by investigating Palin’s professional record.

Campbell Brown of CNN did nothing wrong for instance in pressing a campaign spokesman on Palin’s foreign policy credentials. She was unjustly criticized for following an appropriate and necessary line of inquiry. But endless front page stories connected to Mrs. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter? Cable news shows that had people insinuating Palin, whom America had not yet even met, was a bad mother, and that used her daughter’s circumstances to examine Republican views on abstinence education? That was ugly.

In the end it made Palin the underdog, and gave her the perfect platform for the perfect dive she made Wednesday night.

We have had these old press fights in the past – they were a source of constant tension when I was a child, when Barry Goldwater came forward as a conservative and the press scorned him as a flake, and later when Ronald Reagan came up and the press dismissed him as Bonzo.

But this latest fight commences on a new and wilder battlefield. The old combatants were old school gentlemen, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite; the new combatants are half[???]-crazy cable anchors, the lower lurkers of the Internet, and the anonymous posters on the comment thread on the radical website.

This new war on new turf is not good, and carries the potential of great harm. Everyone really ought to stop, breathe deep, and think.

I am worried they won’t. A friend IM’d the day after Palin’s speech, and I told him of an inexplicable sense of foreboding. He surprised me by saying he shared it. “Calling all underworlds reporting for duty!,” he wrote. “The bed is about to fly around the room, the puke is about to come out.” He meant: this campaign is going to engage unseen powers and forces. He meant: this campaign, this beautiful golden thing with two admirable men at the top and two admirable vice presidential candidates, is going to turn dark.

This war isn’t as new (or “light”) as Peggy Noonan wants to believe.  See the 2004 links above.  Harken back to the Clinton years, particularly his first two, which also happen to be the last time that America was under undivided Donk domination, when the neoBolshevik perpetual, unquenchable rage of today was an equally perpetual, insufferable arrogance.  The breed of arrogance that declared politics to be “over” after 1992, that the nation had finally “come to its senses,” “seen the light,” and restored the beknighted Left to permanent power.  That galloping triumphalism led directly to the unmasked extremism that jacked up tax rates and tried to fascize the entire health care sector in one legislative gulp.

I see it on the face, and hear it in the voice, of The One on a daily basis.  And I see it reflected in the “new” media war against a woman they can’t lay a substantive glove on, leaving them with no other option - like they had as much reluctance as they did glee - but to annihilate her and her family’s name and reputation.

But it’s not a “media” war, in actuality.  Using that adjective is akin to describing “conventional” or “nuclear” war - it describes the weapons and their means of delivery.  But it doesn’t get at the heart of what inspires and drives the conflict.

Michael Knox Beran gets at that heart, one that I have long seen coming:

The deeper division which Governor Palin’s selection has exposed is religious. Palin has called herself a “Bible-believing Christian.” The idea that a person formed in such a troglodytic, pre-Enlightenment school should hold a high place in the government frightens a class that believes, with all the certainty of its Ivy League vision of the world, that Bible-believing Christians are a threat to the republic….

For the coastal elites, Sarah Palin is the barbarian at the gate. McCain, in choosing her, was “cynical,” because in the contest with a secular messiah her faith will not only energize Catholic and Evangelical constituencies (which regard promises of secular salvation dubiously), but will also excite the paranoiac rage of many in the secular-liberal camp. People in the grip of paranoia have been known to do stupid things in elections.

The paranoia is real enough. Americans, Linker writes in The Theocons, must stave off “a future in which the country is thoroughly permeated by orthodox Christian piety.” In the paranoiac view of the coastal elites, Christian piety is a threat to secular politics. Its methods are those of Torquemada. Its ideas are those of the Stone Age. How can people who find a truer account of the human condition in the Bible than in, say, the Origin of Species be, well, reasonable?

“Reason’s last step,” Pascal said in the Pensées, “is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go so far as to realize that.”

It’s a point which even the Blue People implicitly concede. For they, too, have their pent-up longings, their unreasonable yearnings for perfection, redemption, a world beyond pain. Senator Obama, who speaks of the moment when “the perfection begins” (the moment when the proselyte sees the light and embraces his communal faith) offers the Blue People a secular approximation of the nirvana they seek.

Sarah Palin embodies the alternative ideal.

“Blue” America wants to turn aside to myths and worship false messiahs, and DEMANDS that the rest of the country do the same.  “Red” America disagrees, and by that very act of dissent makes itself the embodiment of evil in “blue” eyes, one that demands immediate and total destruction.

Or, to personalize the cultural impasse, Barack Obama poses as the Messiah, and Sarah Palin represents the Genuine Article.  Yet she does not presume or intend to impose that upon anybody, while he does.  But by the very essence of who she is and what (and in Whom) she believes, the other side has declared her a heretic, an enemy of the state, and marked her for persecution.

And she’s not even Obama’s direct opponent.

Beran concurs that 2008 will be even more ugly, more vicious, and more violent, all the moreso given that this contest was never supposed to be anything but a Dem walkover.  Indeed, he argues that the mere presence of Governor Palin on the GOP ticket will make her a more hated figure to the Left than George W. Bush ever was because, despite his overt Christianity, he at least had an Ivy League education as a mitigating veneer of “cosmopolitization.”  Personally I’ve never noticed any such mitigation in their Bushophobia.  But if that argument is true, and so many libs entertained assassination fantasies about the retiring president, and the likelihood of McCain-Palin winning a third consecutive GOP White House term grows, with the clear implication of what some are calling the “Thatcheresque” Barracuda being his heir apparent….well, mightn’t there be some on the Left, deep in the fever swamps, who simply cannot bear the idea of an undiluted, unapologetic, genuine ”Christianist/fundie/snake-handler/Bible-thumper/etc.” that close to real, honest-to-goodness power?  Particularly after enduring “Bushitler” for nearly a decade?  Sufficiently that, shall we say, they might not stop at political means if those prove inadequate to stop her ascension?

The Enemy Media tried to abort Palinmania at its conception - call this week its “morning-after pill”.  If they can’t succeed between now and November - call it “the first trimester” - then the “war” is destined to get dramatically less metaphorical.

[cross-posted at ]

Hmmmmm….:

Sarah Palin found some unlikely allies Wednesday as leading academics and even former top aides to Hillary Rodham Clinton endorsed the Republican charge that John McCain’s running mate has been subject to a sexist double standard by the news media and Democrats.

Georgetown University professor Deborah Tannen, who has written best-selling books on gender differences, said she agrees with complaints that Palin skeptics — including prominent voices in the news media — have crossed a line by speculating about whether the Alaska governor is neglecting her family in pursuit of national office.

“What we’re dealing with now, there’s nothing subtle about it,” said Tannen. “We’re dealing with the assumption that child-rearing is the job of women and not men. Is it sexist? Yes.”

“There’s no way those questions would be asked of a male candidate,” said Howard Wolfson a former top strategist for Clinton’s presidential campaign.

This from the same bunch that made a very prominent public spectacle of crying “sexism” against Team Messiah back in the primary season, which was another way of morally condemning Lucifer for denying the Empress her rightful throne - “Sweetiegate” not withstanding.  Just, of course, like the opposite result would have generated snarls of “RACISM!” - and, of course, Obamanation rode that card to nominational victory.  Not a very….practical result given that there are more women voters in the country than African-American voters.

Which makes the defamation campaign against Governor Palin by The One’s nutter surrogates this week all the more self-defeatingly foolish, as evidenced by this rather stark admission of weakness in the face of a genuinely strong woman:

Senator Barack Obama will increasingly lean on prominent Democratic women to undercut Governor Sarah Palin and Senator John McCain, dispatching Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to Florida on Monday and bolstering his plan to deploy female surrogates to battleground states, Obama advisers said Thursday…

Obama aides said they were counting on not only Mrs. Clinton but also Democratic female governors to rebut Mrs. Palin — and, by extension, Mr. McCain. Those governors include Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas…

“What McCain has done with Governor Palin’s nomination is aim right at a demographic that Obama needs to address quickly: noncollege-educated women,” said Mike McCurry, a former spokesman in the Clinton White House. “They need to maximize Biden’s ability to reach out to them, but at the end of the day, it is Obama who has to get that very, very critical group.”…

Advisers to Mrs. Clinton said that she stood ready to help the Obama-Biden ticket, but they urged the campaign not to overestimate the impact Mrs. Clinton could have, noting that she had other commitments this fall, like campaigning and raising money for Senate candidates.

There’s an old joke that goes, “What do you have when you hold two tiny green objects in your hand?  Answer: Kermit’s undivided attention.”  False Messiah rode his ethnicity to the Democrat nomination, but burned quite a few gender bridges behind him en route.  He could have repaired those bridges in one fell swoop by taking Her Nib on as his running mate, even though he would have been condemning himself to four years as a de facto figurehead.  He could also have repaired those bridges by picking Governors Sebelius or Napolitano, or at the very least from the short list of female Donk Senate colleagues, which would have made an undying enemy of Medusa but blunted any attempted sabotage from La Clinton Nostra down the fall home stretch.  Instead, he went with what amounts to a white, twenty-years-older version of himself, Joe “Gaffe-A-Minute” Biden, leaving the door wide open for John McCain to blow everybody away with Sarah Palin.

Now Barack Obama is in the worst place imaginable: right where Hillary Clinton wants him.  At her never-tender mercy.  He needs her to rally the PUMAs to his banner or risk getting swamped by Palinmania, and they both know it.

And in that context comes several top Clintonoids promptly stoking the “sexism” fires again, and Hillary coyly pledging to play the good soldier (heck, she DID put Barry over the top in Denver last week) but dousing it in a deluge of patently phony modesty and “scheduling conflicts.”

Given the dismal fate of pretty much every Democrat for whom Bill and/or Hillary have ever campaigned, I’m baffled that the Chief Stumbling Block wants either of them on the same continent.  I wonder if he realizes just how disappointed Jesse Jackson is going to be to find that Mrs. Clinton got to his own set first.

UPDATE: J-Ger imagines the phone call:

“Hey, sorry about that bitter primary thing, calling your husband racist, and the lack of campaign debt relief. Could you do me a favor and alienate a certain portion of your voters, obliterate your newfound respect from some corners of the right, and incinerate your chance to head a Democratic ticket in 2012 by making a kamikaze run at America’s newest sweetheart, in order to save my tuchus? Thanks.”

[cross-posted at ]

“Therefore, son of man, prophesy and say to Gog: ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: In that day, when My people Israel are living in safety, will you not take notice of it? You will come from your place in the far north, you and many nations with you, all of them riding on horses, a great horde, a mighty army. 16 You will advance against My people Israel like a cloud that covers the land. In days to come, O Gog, I will bring you against My land, so that the nations may know Me when I show Myself holy through you before their eyes.

Here’s an interesting little nuance of Russia’s attack on Georgia last month (via Carl in Jerusalem):

In a secret agreement between Israel and Georgia, two military airfields in southern Georgia had been earmarked for the use of Israeli fighter-bombers in the event of pre-emptive attacks against Iranian nuclear installations. This would sharply reduce the distance Israeli fighter-bombers would have to fly to hit targets in Iran. And to reach Georgian airstrips, the Israeli air force would fly over Turkey.

The attack ordered by Saakashvili against South Ossetia the night of August 7 provided the Russians the pretext for Moscow to order Special Forces to raid these Israeli facilities where some Israeli drones were reported captured.

Now not only are those Georgian airfields no longer available for Israeli use against Iran, but thanks to the undiminished incompetence of Israeli Brigadier General Gal Hirsch - the commander of Israeli forces on the Lebanese border in July 2006 - but the Russians reportedly got hold of an Israeli unmanned aerial vehicle complete with sophisticated electronic reconnaissance equipment.  Which means we can count on them reverse-engineering it and passing on that helpful information to their clients in Tehran and Damascus.

The loss of a northern axis of attack limits the potential effectiveness of an Israel pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facililties.  Shorter distance is only one factor; as one of Carl’s commenters points out, Iran’s air defenses are concentrated to the west and south, not the north, and the mountainous Caucasian terrain makes it easier for low-flying aircraft to evade radar.  It’s not difficult to project that we envisioned using those Georgian airfields for airstrikes against those same targets as well.

Now that option has been, if not eliminated, than far less likely.  And the chances for a direct solution to the Iranian nuclear problem dwindled away to virtually nothing quite some time ago as it is.

This may be the stake through the heart of avoiding a nuclear war in the Middle East - or over our own territory.

Like the old man at the gas station told Sara Connor at the end of The Terminator, “There’s a storm coming.”  Seven years after 9/11, are we any less fat, dumb, and oblivious now than we were then?

[cross-posted at ]

A disabled American veteran, having survived 9/11 in the hills of Tajikistan, describes the events involving currently deployed American Forces and how the Vietnam vets shouldn’t compare today’s war to yesterday’s.

As the remnants and incorrigible hippies and their off-spring of the Vietnam War Era make a mockery of themselves and the United States Armed Forces in Berkeley, CA in these recent days unfolds, I am reminded of the ludicrous fallacy of the ‘Ugly American’.

Of the many things I have been called by unhinged, hysterical leftwingers, few names cause me to chuckle more than “The Ugly American”. The title (like everything else liberals believe) has no basis in any historical reality.

The name was gleaned from a 1958 novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. The book was intended to show that America was losing the war against communism because of our loud, boorish arrogance and inability to understand other cultures. Like all the other dogmas of liberalism, it is based purely in fantasy- fantasy that history would expose.

That The Ugly American was a novel should end the discussion. An argument is exposed as inadequate if it must rely on fictitious events to support it. Much speculation has been made about who the characters in the book (and later, in the movie) represented, but it is so much nonsensical blather.

Let’s look at the facts.

First, War is as old as civilization itself. Since Cain first slew Abel, mankind’s barbarity has been a matter of sad fact. In fact, as time has gone by, the ability of man to torture, maim, brutalize and slay his fellow man has only been brought to more grotesque perfection while the world continues to fall into an ever more cold and callous slumber.

Second, America was not losing the war against communism. In fact, we won the war against communism. That is an objective historical fact, leftist revisionism notwithstanding.

Third, America was certainly not losing the war in Southeast Asia. At least, not by any standard by which war has ever been measured before. That America was losing the war in Vietnam is a work of pure liberal fiction.

America lost the Vietnam war, not to the communists, but to the American Government. That is a fact and it is indisputable. In an article published in Front Page Magazine, Bui Tin, a former North Vietnamese Col. admitted that the North Vietnamese were not achieving military victories, only political ones.

Question: How did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans?

Answer: By fighting a long war which would break their will to help South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said,”We don’t need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out.”

The American protester was essential to the enemy efforts.

It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.

The Vietnamese army knew they could not defeat the Americans. Only the Americans could do that.

If Johnson had granted [Gen. William] Westmoreland’s requests to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh trail, Hanoi could not have won the war.

The enemies of America resurrect the ghost of Vietnam to protest American intervention at any time, in any place. The lesson of Vietnam, they insist, is that an occupier cannot win against a well entrenched insurgency. That lesson, also, is a work of fantasy. When liberals make idiotic claims like this, they only betray their own blind ignorance of history.

The fact is that insurgencies rarely succeed. A student of history would know this, a student of fantasy would not. America did not lose the Vietnam war because of the Ugly Americans over there, it lost because of the [sic] beautiful people here. Namby Pamby sissy types took the streets of America by storm and it was the American citizen, not the American soldier, that could not counter it.

Myths about invincible guerrillas and insurgents are a direct result of America’s collective misunderstanding of its defeat in South Vietnam. This loss is generally credited to the brilliance and military virtues of the pajama-clad Vietcong. The Vietnamese may have been tough and persistent, but they were not brilliant. Rather, they were lucky - they faced an opponent with leaders unwilling to learn from their failures: the United States. When the Vietcong went toe-to-toe with U.S. forces in the 1968 Tet Offensive, they were decimated. When South Vietnam finally fell in 1975, it did so not to the Vietcong, but to regular units of the invading North Vietnamese Army. The Vietcong insurgency contributed greatly to the erosion of the American public’s will to fight, but so did the way that President Lyndon Johnson and the American military waged the war. It was North Vietnam’s will and American failure, not skillful use of an insurgency, that were the keys to Hanoi’s victory.

America lost the Vietnam war because-and only because- she lost the will to fight it. Due to the efforts of traitors and liars like John Kerry and Jane Fonda, public opinion was turned against that effort. It was a death by a thousand cuts. Make no mistake, America surrendered in a war it was winning over there because it could not put down an insurgency back here.

Leftists have attempted to capitalize on America’s humiliation in Vietnam by co-opting a Novel’s fantasy of The Ugly American into a pseudo reality. Remember, The Ugly American was a Novel that takes place in a fictional place called Sarkhan. The foreign policy of the America haters works great in imaginary places. It is in the realm of reality on earth that it is somewhat wanting.

The fantasy of The Ugly American provides a convenient model for moral cowards that are jealous of America and willing to scapegoat her for their empty, meaningless lives. These hysterical cowards envision an America that has been a friend of despots and tyrants but history has been quite unkind to their pathological delusions. For, from Poland to Nicaragua, from Grenada to Iraq, more of the world’s people are free and safe, fed, clothed, educated and receiving medical care, as a result of the American Soldier, than because of the combined efforts of all the other nations in the history of the world.

Now, it is no secret that I have had a great deal of fun over the years, poking my enemies with the proverbial stick. I have derived what is probably an unhealthy level of enjoyment by driving unhinged leftist baboons into volcanic fits of rage, by using their own rabid bigotry against them.

It is true that I do not mind being hated by these wild-eyed, spoiled and petulant little cretins. In fact, I relish it. For, I have yet to find one who can articulate a doctrine of how the world is that goes any deeper than “It’s America’s fault”. As shallow as that is, it is all they have…a feeling and ill-conceived belief.

You may call me an ugly American when I say that we can bomb whoever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want, then sit back gleefully and watch leftist cretins meltdown. Even though I say such things only to be incendiary, and entertain myself and, even though they certainly don’t reflect my real views, you could make the case that it is an ugly thing to say. That’s fair enough. I’ll accept the charge.

Just don’t expect an apology. I have my reasons. My brother was KIA in Quang Tri Province during the Tet Offensive of 1968. If there is one thing I have learned from the Police Action in Vietnam, it is this. I shall not sit idly by…as my parents and elders did…and let the unhinged do to our veterans now and our Armed Forces now, that which they did in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

For me, true ugliness is not manifested in words purely intended to incite wrath from those who are mentally unbalanced to begin with. To me, true ugliness is manifested in cold indifference to the suffering of innocent people.

You see, for me, people are real. Real pain, real suffering and real anguish are part of the human experience of oppressed people living under the iron fist of tyranny. People live under no more horrid tyranny and brutality than those burdened with the yoke of 7th century Islamic Sharia law.

For the christophobes and the America and Israel haters, all religions are equal and American and Israeli imperialism is the source of all the world’s ills. Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, reality tells a very different story, for Sharia oppression and Islamic barbarism are as old as the religion of peace, itself. Once again, a student of history can quickly attest to the truth of what I claim, while a student of fantasy will merely kick and scream in protest.

Unlike the coalition of the callous, we do not have the luxury of living in a world where other people simply don’t matter. When they look upon an oppressed people, the narcissists merely rationalize that their plight is-in some way- the result of some past American sin. This, inexplicably, renders the victim unworthy of relief or rescue.

In the world in which we live, it is simply unconscionable to view human beings as no more than pawns in a giant blame the imperialist Americans game.That is what I call ugly.

When I hear the blame America crowd calling the Iraq war immoral and demanding we pull out, I feel ill. When they compare the so-called Immoral war in Iraq with the so-called immoral war in Vietnam, I laugh.

Immoral war in Vietnam? More immoral than victims abandoned in Saigon? More immoral than the killing fields?

It is too easy for the pseudo-intellectuals to stand on the sideline, in a perpetual state of craven condemnation of American foreign policy abroad. They have that luxury because they never have to accept the consequences of their vapid stupidity. Fools such as these empty headed cretins cannot understand the difference between education and intelligence, and are fully lacking in the ability to see the world as it really is.

The one thing liberal elitists are good at is being wrong. They were wrong about Chamberlain and Carter’s pacifism just as surely as they were wrong about Reagan’s peace through strength and their opposition to the Vietnam war.

Never, ever, have they been as provably wrong as they have been in Iraq.

They predicted the fall of Iraq would not be accomplished without tens of thousands of American dead. They were wrong. They pithily argued that the handover of power wouldn’t happen, they were wrong. They claimed the elections would be stopped- wrong again.

More elections, a parliament, a prime minister, a Constitution….

wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Finally, when things were going poorly, came the surge. Yet again, the apostles of failure predicted sure defeat.

Humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat. Have they learned? Of course not. They drone on in ever more bitter, ever more caustic fits of neurotic rage and feigned condescension.

…..but we know the truth, don’t we?

They, not us, are the ugly ones. Yes, we are arrogant and boorish to them. Yes, we do push them down and kick sand in their faces but we all know they deserve it, so few say anything about it.

After all, these cowards are willing to consign a person…a nation….an entire race to poverty, oppression and misery just to reinforce an arrogant, self-serving hatred towards a nation they are jealous of. Ugly Americans? There is no such thing. We overthrow ugliness and we suffer not the crap of the cowardly pigs who would stand in our way.

In conclusion, then, that which transpired in Vietnam over there and over here; that which transpired against the returning veterans, will not - I repeat - will not happen again…ever. Not on our watch.

This is all so evident because the Iraq War is not even a campaign issue any longer because the politicos were on the wrong side of the issue and they know it now as they knew it then. Why is it not an issue this year, if this were not so? All we hear now is “change”.

“Change” to what and from what? They want to “change” from that which was wrought in 2006 and 2007? Didn’t they run on that platform of “change”. Did not that “change” fail? They want to “change” from last years’ rhetoric? Does that mean they want to win, now? Or, do they merely use their all too familiar “change” ignorance to appeal to the emotionally unbalanced?

Speak up, Mr Reid, Mr Obama, Madame Pelosi, Mr Murtha, Mr Kennedy. We cannot hear you.

Cross posted from Digital Journal.

We gain nothing of any substance from this twenty-sixth agreement with the Kim regime, which will be riven by them just like all twenty-five of its predecessors, and the NoKos and Red Chinese gain breathing room for the rogue regime’s next round of nuclearization and consequent sabre-rattling and mischief-making.  Only next time their nukes won’t fizzle - and won’t be tested inside a cave, but on Tokyo or Seattle.

-Me, 6/27/08

It’s barely taken two months for the NoKos to start reneging on this latest “historic breakthrough for peace and triumph of multilateral diplomacy.” My only question is, what took ‘em so long?:

Before workers began moving mothballed equipment back into place, North Korea informed U.S. personnel at its Yongbyon nuclear plant it would start reassembling its nuclear facilities, a South Korean official said Thursday.

Pyongyang gave the notification Tuesday to U.S. personnel stationed at the North’s Yongbyon nuclear plant and started moving some equipment, taken apart from plutonium-producing facilities, out of storage Wednesday, said a Foreign Ministry official.

“They were moving some equipment” to the original sites, said the official, citing information provided by the United States. But he did not say what the equipment was. The official spoke on condition of anonymity citing the issue’s sensitivity.

Well, now, THAT’s brazen, isn’t it? They’re deep-sixing the “disarmament agreement” and moving to restore Yongbyon to fully operational status right in front of us - oh, sorry, the FIVE of “us” (US, Japan, South Korea, Red [haha] China, and Russia [hahahaha]) - and all but smirkingly flipping us the bird while they do it.

And “our” reaction? Do you have to ask?:

“This is a clear violation of a six-party agreement,” he said, referring to a disarmament pact that the North reached with the U.S. and four other nations last year. The official said Seoul would try to persuade Pyongyang to reverse its action.

In Tokyo, Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said Japan is in close contact with the U.S. and South Korea on the development.

“We are aware that (North Korea) is engaged in an activity to remove some of the key equipment out of the storage, and we are concerned about the situation,” he said.

OOOOH. The Japanese are “concerned”. The SoKos will “try to persuade” their northern counterparts to “reverse their action.” Well, THAT ought to put the fear of God into Kim jong-iL.

Heaven knows we won’t:

The U.S. played down Pyongyang’s latest step.

“Based on what we know from the reports on the ground, you don’t have an effort to reconstruct, reintegrate this equipment back into the facility,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Foggy Bottom’s spin is that this latest move is only a negotiating tactic meant to pressure Washington to keep its promise to take Pyongyang off the terror list. They cite in support of this “hopeful” conclusion that the NoKos have not - yet - ousted U.S. and U.N. on-site monitors overseeing the nuclear fuel facility’s alleged dismantling.

Mayhap that is a reason and mayhap it isn’t. But another most definitely is an indefatiguible determination to poke, prod, and otherwise test Western resolve. Recall that the biggest factor in North Korea strategically retreating from its nuclear weapons development was that their first full-fledged test fizzled. Communists know better than anyone that you don’t back up blustering threats like the ones they were issuing two years ago if you can’t back them up with more than blanks. The nuke they set off underground in the far northeast corner of their territory was, by modern nuclear weapons standards, a dud (not even a kiloton). Having lost face - for the moment - Kim backed off.

Now he’s reassembling his nuclear weapons facility right in front of us, and what is the response of ourselves and our equally feckless allies? “Concern,” “(diplomatic) persuasion,” and another wallowing indulgence in rationalizing and wishful-thinking.

Sex isn’t the only thing in which there’s always a morning after. Making deals with communist regimes is pointless because they cannot be trusted to abide by their obligations. How much more pointless are such “accords” when there are no enforcement provisions, no pre-defined, imposable sanctions for non-compliance, and less than no willingness on the part of the “three-nation united anti-NoKo nukes front and their two ill-disguised enablers” to do whatever it takes to force Pyongyang to keep their word?

What will we do if the ChiComms and Russkies don’t lean on their client to backtrack from their backtrack? If they do kick out the international monitors and fire up Yongbyon again? Was the point of this four-year diplomatic cluster to disarm the NoKos or buy time for Round #27?