Bush’s ‘Pygmy’ Problem

Bush's “Pygmy” Problem

UPDATE: Tony Snow has cracked. Wow, that didn't take long, now did it?

INCOMING!

President Bush and his administration took a serious foreign policy hit yesterday
on “Meet the Press.” I know, you're shocked, but it's true, though, no doubt, some will buy Bush's new foreign policy pr line, desperately hoping that Bush won't blow this one too.

Long after Bush called Kim John Il everything from a “pygmy” to “a
spoiled child at the dinner table,” not to mention “the world's most
dangerous regime,” you've got to wonder what the plan is now. You know,
now that Kimmie has quadrupled his nuclear capabilities, launched flaccid firecrackers
on our Independence Day, and generally made a fool out of our president.

George W. Bush isn't even safe from conservatives.

Which led Nick Eberstadt, a conservative critic from the American Enterprise Institute—these are not Democrats. He offered this, “Although the Bush administration’s rhetoric about Kim Jong Il and his regime has sometimes been ferocious, … North Korea’s leaders seem to have concluded that the Bush North Korea policy consists mainly of empty words – and that oft-repeated warnings need not be taken terribly seriously. By more than one criterion, indeed, Pyongyang’s strategic successes on the Bush watch outshine those from its brinkmanship during the Clinton years.” Would you acknowledge a significant increase in the nuclear capability by North Korea on the watch of President Bush? MR. BURNS: Tim, obviously, we profoundly disagree with, with some of the statements that we’ve just heard. You know, we’ve got a very strong military force and deterrent force at work in Asia and particularly on the Korean peninsula, and that military can handle any contingency that should arise. We also have a very tough policy and I think forward-looking policy to develop missile defense to handle those contingencies. But you’ve got to combine military measures with diplomacy to be effective in a situation like this. The fact is that a lot of this criticism seems to direct the United States back to a test of wills bilaterally between North Korea and the United States. What we want to do is we want to ask countries that do have a great deal of influence on Chi—on North Korea—certainly more than we have—to use that influence. We, we can do that by channeling those efforts through the six-party framework. And you know, diplomacy sometimes can’t succeed in a day or two, or a week or two. Sometimes it takes many months, or even years to succeed. But if you have the right policy in place. If you know what you’re trying to accomplish and if you’re very tough-minded about applying that policy, we can be successful. So we have not given up hope that we can engineer a policy that will effectively put the North Koreans back in the box, take away their nuclear programs and take away their ability to inflict threats and damage on their neighbors. “Meet the Press” (above taken from pg. 2)

One thing was made clear yesterday. President Clinton at least kept the North Koreans
at bay for years. Read the transcript. I'm not kidding, read it. Bush has complicated his policy on North Korean by ignoring them for years in lieu of his preemptive adventure in Iraq. It's really stupefying that we actually pay our president to get results like this.

A study released yesterday indicates that North Korea is likely to have bolstered its stockpile of fissile material more than sixfold since U.S. President George W. Bush took office in 2001, Reuters reported (see GSN, June 26). The report, issued by the Institute for Science and International Security, concludes that Pyongyang has moved from possessing sufficient plutonium for no more than two nuclear weapons to having enough for up to 13. The study also predicts that it could have material for more than 17 bombs by 2009. (source: AP, North Korea Boosts Fissile Material Stockpile, 6.27.06)

This all happened on George W. Bush's watch, while he was going after the defunct
dictator in the Iraqi desert; someone who absolutely was not a clear and present danger.

Somebody needs to put a phone call into Rush and Sean's shows today and shove this reality up their radio blow holes. Blaming Bill just won't work anymore.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled Iraq war massacre.