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Let’s face it: KIm Jong Il is the Hoodoo King of the far east! How else to explain the utterly improbable events we have seen unfold whenever Kim is involved? Such mojo deserves an epic poem, alright maybe just a rock song.
Gov. Richardson is hardly the first to cast free will to the winds and dance to Kim’s tune. Bill Clinton, a bit of a hoodoo man himself, at least in his own mind, and Madeline Albright were long under Kim’s spell, much to his glee and profit. We all thought that George Bush was a considerably more flinty guy, and, indeed, for the first five years or so of W’s presidency, it looked like the Hoodoo King had met his match. To the considerable dismay of many, in virtually all matters of foreign policy, the last year has seen the Bush administration’s resolve disintegrate like a wedge of cake in a rain storm. Whether this has been the result of Secretary Rice’s misguided advice, or other now unknown factors, the country has proceeded like a rudderless boat, sails flapping, and destination unknown to the seemingly clueless administration crew.
This sad state of affairs has been glaringly obvious in the recent negotiations with Kim who is back and in fine form. Kim’s Hoodoo amnesia ray is tuned up and in action: the entire State Department seems oblivious of Kim’s history. Sec. Rice, and negotiator Chris Hill, who is no doubt a man of good will, seem to think that Kim has recently had a wildly successful moral compass transplant.
We’ve all followed the soap opera of the U$25 extremely large that Kim wants up front. As recently as a couple of days ago, China Interfax was reporting that, even after 13 days of friendly persuasion by Treasury’s head terrorism honcho, Daniel Glaser, Bank of China would still not play ball and act as a conduit to get the hot bucks to Kim for fear of harming its own reputation and rating. I’ve had a recurring vision (complete with soundtrack, soon to be available on iTunes) of Chris Hill on the back roads of China, dragging suitcases of real Benjamins to the North Korean border in a desperate attempt to get Kim back into negotiations (cue the Chambers Brothers’ great hit, “Money, Money, Money”). All through this long slog, Ambassador Hill has hope in his heart (cue Eric Clapton’s “Running on Faith”). When he gets to the boarder, there is Kim swilling Courvoisier in the back of his limo. The moment of truth. What will Kim do? “You brought the money?…….Good…..Put it in the trunk!” The limo trunk lid and Kim’s door slam shut at the same time. The limo peels out leaving Ambassador Hill standing in the road in a cloud of dust (cue Aretha’s iconic “Respect”). The boarder guards laugh. No one offers a ride back to Beijing. A wiser, though much sadder, Ambassador slowly retraces his steps (cue Aretha’s “Trouble in Mind”). Fade to black. This spectacle may yet come to pass — for the Hoodoo King wants his cash. Sense, wisdom, free will, nothing seems to withstand Kim’s desire for more. The man’s a black hole of consciousness, and we seem helplessly caught and desperate to chuck in anything he wants. Why does Western civilization so carelessly cast itself toward the event horizon of tyranny?

Hold on, hold on, the sound you hear is Talleyrand whirring in his grave! Check out this article from this morning’s Washington Times: U.S. Reverses North Korea Policy. The State Department, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to release the now infamous $25,000000 directly to North Korea, and “will now rely on Pyongyang’s ‘good faith’ to ensure that funds released yesterday from a Macao bank are not misused.” State Department spokesman Sean “McCormack said the North Koreans had promised ‘to spend the money for the betterment of the North Korean people,’ and not for the personal benefit of its officials.” McCormack continued,

“In any negotiation, you are going to get to a point where every party … wants something, and they are not going to get it exactly in the form that they want it — and that’s part of the negotiating process,” he said.
“You compromise, but you compromise within reason,” he said. “You compromise in order to achieve a larger objective and the important thing is that, along the way, you not abandon [your] principles … and what you want to achieve at the end of the process.”
“This is a process in which good-faith actions will be met in turn by good faith, which results in a building of confidence, which allows all the parties to make some of the tough decisions that are going to be needed if we are going to all achieve our goals,” Mr. McCormack said.

This would be hilarious were it not so pitifully lame. Why don’t we throw in the Liberty Bell too! A careful and reasoned review of the Kim case should have shown the folk at State that constant caving to his demands in the hope that he will then do as we ask in “good faith” is an unending enterprise that never yields positive results. Indeed, the Clinton/Albright cave ushered in the era of Nuclear Kim. With the Bush/Rice/Hill collapse, we will next be confronted with Intercontinental Ballistic Kim. Nancy Pelosi may want to start work on her home fallout shelter ASAP. There will come a point when the “good faith” amnesiac map Condi and her chums are carefully following will meet the harsh reality of the actual geography that is the nature of Kim Jong Il. What price will the rest of us pay for this education sentimentale at the State Department?

Nancy Pelosi and Bashar Assad; Steny Hoyer and the Muslim Brotherhood; now Bill Richardson and Kim Jong Il. Is it fair to say we detect a pattern here?

I don’t care if you like President Bush or loathe him–can we at least agree that based on evidence like this, the Democrats would be catastrophic in the White House?

Bloodthirsty Liberal
http://bloodthirstyliberal.com

To Bloodthirsty Liberal – you are reading the pattern correctly. The next chapter seems to be Pelosi and friends visiting Iran. This time I hope the Bush Admin. has the gonads to arrest them for treason/sedition. Pelosi+ need to sit down, shut up, and know their proper place, and it is NOT in the Executive Branch! Now if we can just find a true Conservative for ‘08!!

Y’all have misinterpreted Richardson’s visit to Pyongyang badly. I think it will get NK back to the table and open it up to UN Inspectors, personally. This is what I think:

“One thing the Bush administration has never understood is that diplomacy and military power are not alternatives to one another, but rather are complementary sources of strength. Because diplomacy without power is weak; power without diplomacy is blind.”

This is the core of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson’s international platform, taken from a speech he gave in New Hampshire in late 2006, and the kind of insight he gained as UN Ambassador and Energy Secretary during Clinton. His international resume is a breath of fresh air, and since the USA needs urgently to rebuild and to entirely rethink its international policies, after 6 years of corporate Halliburton-driven plutocracy, I believe Richardson really MUST become President.

Our domestic economy is in the pits because of hundreds of billions of
dollars going to Iraq and to Afghanistan, mostly military expenditures, all to advance the Bush Administration’s corporate agenda. Other nations are capitalizing on our errors and our distractions, like China with its
trillion dollar balance of payments, as well as Russia, which funded many of the developing nations in colonial struggles, both pointing to our oppressive presence in Iraq, telling African, South Asian, and South American nations that they are perfectly willing to BUY their natural resources, instead of plundering them, as we are so transparently doing in Iraq!

The international backlash of a totally failed USA foreign policy has profound implications for a worsening USA domestic economy, and the situation is getting seriously worse by the day. This is why I support Bill Richardson’s presidential campaign. He recently stated the war would be over on his first day in office, and his trip to North Korea is already bringing
important results.

Here is another quote from 3/28: “I would not leave any troops in Iraq. … If I were president today, I would withdraw by the end of this calendar year. But I would also have a reconciliation conference of the 3
religious groups, forge a coalition government, and divide the country into three entities… I don’t believe you need a residual force in Iraq. I believe you need any troops that you can deploy from Iraq. I would put them in Afghanistan, where al Qaeda and the Taliban are serious threats”
(”Hardball,” MSNBC, 3/28).

How about putting USA’s troops nowhere, for a change?] Truly,

Stephen Fox
(P.S. I am in no way connected with the Richardson campaign; these are my own views entirely)
New Millennium Fine Art
217 W. Water St.
Santa Fe, NM 87501
Stephen@santafefineart.com
505 983-2002

Thanks for the self-plug, Mr. Fox. One thing the Left cannot seem to get into their heads is that appeasement and payoffs may buy time but never solve the problem of aggression by warlike and hostile tyrants. This is why we have had US troops in Korea for over 55 years with no end in sight. The Left thinks giving in to extortion is a wise policy. By the way, will the Dems in Congress want to set a deadline for these troops to go over the horizon soon?