Tag Archives: Kim Jong Un

International news, media news

Who’s the real ‘enemy,’ Mr. President?

I find it weird in the extreme that Donald J. Trump is getting cozy with a real “enemy of the American people.”

Except that the president has declared another entity to be the people’s No. 1 enemy.

He calls North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un an “honorable” man. Yes, a young despot who should be tried for crimes against humanity on the basis of the treatment he levels against his own people is now the president’s newest best friend. Trump calls Kim “smart” and a “great negotiator.”

Oh, but who’s the “enemy” that Trump has identified? It’s the media. The American journalists who cover the Trump administration has incurred the president’s wrath. He calls the media the “greatest enemy of the American people.”

Now, I believe that is a perversion of the first order.

The president cuddles (proverbially) with dictators/thugs/killers while excoriating the media that are seeking to hold him and his administration accountable to the public — the president’s employers.

I don’t know about you, but the president has it exactly backward.

Oh, and then there are the Russians …

International news

Trump defends a killer? Weird, man

Donald J. Trump’s infatuation with men who run their nations under heavy boots, heavy hands and sheer fright is shining more brightly than ever.

The president is defending his newest best friend, Kim Jong Un, by suggesting that his ruthlessness in governing North Korea is done out of necessity.

Here is how Politico reported some of what Trump has said about Kim: “He’s a tough guy,” the president said during a Fox News interview that aired Wednesday. “When you take over a country, a tough country, tough people and you take it over from your father — I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have — if you can do that at 27 years old, that’s one in 10,000 that could do that. So he’s a very smart guy. He’s a great negotiator, but I think we understand each other.”

So, Kim’s father — Kim Jong Il — died in 2011, giving the young man a chance to lead his desperately poor nation. How does Kim Jong Un respond? By furthering the starvation, intimidation, abuses, crimes against humanity that his father and grandfather made infamous during their respective regimes.

Politico continued: Trump made his comments Tuesday aboard Air Force One on his return from Singapore, where he’d met with Kim and hailed the North Korean leader as a “smart” and “funny guy” who “loves his people.”

Smart? Funny guy? Someone who “loves” his people?

He is cagey, cunning and supremely frightening to his subjects, the citizens of North Korea.

I laughed out loud last night when MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell made this curious observation: He said Kim Jong Un is the only “overweight” North Korean because he — unlike his subjects — is able to eat whatever he wants, whenever he wants and in whatever quantities he chooses. North Korea’s citizens, meanwhile, are starving — many of them to death.

This is the guy Donald Trump calls “honorable”?

Disgraceful.

International news

No longer a nuke threat? Really, Mr. President?

Donald J. Trump needs to get over himself.

Well, I am aware that he won’t, but I thought I’d say it anyway.

The president has returned to the White House and has declared categorically, without equivocation, that the United States no longer faces a “nuclear threat” from North Korea.

Whoa! Let’s hold on here. Trump and North Korean killer/dictator/despot Kim Jong Un met in Singapore earlier this week. They signed a vague agreement to begin to talk about “denuclearization,” and now the president says the threat from the North is over? It’s gone? Finished? We can live in peace and harmony?

Pardon my skepticism, but I believe the president has gotten way ahead of his own dog-and-pony show.

I agree with many observers that Trump gave away far more than he got from Kim during their meeting in Singapore. The president ended joint military exercises — aka “war games” — with South Korea, which is precisely what Kim had demanded. The two leaders apparently said next to nothing about human rights atrocities that occur daily in North Korea. Then Kim said Trump promised to end economic sanctions against North Korea.

The two met with virtually no preconditions. Remember how Republicans — and, yes, Democrats — excoriated Barack Obama for suggesting he might do that? Now it’s OK. No sweat.

The president hasn’t removed any threat of nuclear war with North Korea, despite his boasting and bellowing.

He won’t control his impulse for self-aggrandizement. It falls on the many of his constituents to seek to lend some perspective to all the bellicosity.

International news

Are we witnessing a classic liar’s contest?

Donald J. Trump is known rather colloquially here in the States as the “Liar in Chief.”

I have no idea what they call Kim Jong Un in his country, North Korea. Certainly nothing out loud, given the junior despot’s propensity for offing those who speak — or even think — ill of him.

This much apparently has been established about Kim: He’s a liar. Maybe he’s even more adept at lying than Donald Trump, not that the president is any good at lying.

Kim has made plenty of promises. And broken them. That makes him a liar. He comes from good lying stock, given what his father — Kim Jong Il — promised in 1994: He’d get rid of nuclear weapons; the elder Kim didn’t do what he said he would do.

As for Trump, well, his lying has become legendary: He said he tracked down evidence that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and not in Hawaii; he did nothing of the kind. He said he witnessed “thousands of Muslims” cheering the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11; he lied there. Trump said President Obama ordered the bugging of his campaign offices in Trump Tower; another lie.

He lies constantly. The question now becomes whether he knows he’s lying, whether he thinks he’s telling the truth or whether he knows that we know he’s lying, but doesn’t give a damn.

Trump and Kim have looked each other in the eye. Trump made more promises than Kim did, or so it appears. How does Kim believe the president who I am sure he knows is the pathological liar he has proven to be? For that matter, how does Trump trust Kim to keep his own word, given that he no doubt knows about Kim’s behavior?

I am fond of referring to a “liar’s contest” involving two men who are prone to telling tall tales.

Something tells me this newfound Donald Trump/Kim Jong Un “friendship” is built on a body of lies.

International news

Did POTUS give away the store to Kim?

Honest to goodness, I want to give Donald Trump props for meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and possibly start laying down the building blocks for a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula.

However, I gave some thought en route from Amarillo to Fairview about what transpired this week.

I am wondering plenty at this moment about what the president has given away.

  • Donald Trump has called this killer, despot and tyrant an “honorable” man. He has said his people “love” him. The president who once called Kim “Little Rocket Man” has now become his newest BFF.
  • Then he decided to end joint military exercises with South Korea. Did the president consult with, oh, South Korea? Or with his own defense secretary, James “Mad Dog” Mattis? Or the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Oh, no. Trump did it on his own. Hey, he’s commander in chief, so I guess he is entitled to do whatever the hell he wants. How do you suppose Kim Jong Un responded to that idea? He well might have jumped straight into the air, high-fiving his top aides; he got what he has demanded all along!
  • And did the president raise any issue about human rights, which do not exist in North Korea? Kim is starving his people. He is imprisoning them for no good reason. He orders the deaths of foes. Kim’s goons capture tourist and charge them with bogus allegations. Did the negotiator in chief bring any of this up with Little Rocket Man? I do not believe he did.

So, where do we stand?

Trump and Kim have signed a vague two-page letter committing to negotiate an end to nuclear weapons in North Korea. No promise that the North Koreans will actually get rid of them, just a vow to talk about it.

I’m still hoping to cheer the president. I still want him to succeed for the benefit of the country. I still await some sign that Donald Trump knows what he is doing.

I am afraid I must withhold the cheers.

International news

It’s only a beginning, however …

Well, so far so good. Maybe. Possibly. We can hold our breath now.

Donald J. Trump and Kim Jong Un — the leaders of two enemy nations — have met, shaken hands and have signed an agreement that commits North Korea to reaching a peace agreement on the Korean Peninsula.

That means eventual “denuclearization.” It means an end to “war games” with U.S. and South Korean forces practicing ways they can fend off a potential attack from the North; the president called the exercises “provocative.”

Where in the name of world peace to we go from here?

Perhaps the bigger question is whether we can trust the North Korean dictator — who’s killed dissenters by the thousands and ordered the murder of members of his own family — to keep his word.

The president, in an extraordinary — and frankly, incredulous — about-face, has called Kim an “honorable” man. He said his people “love” him. Really, Mr. President? They love this guy?

President Reagan used to invoke a Russian saying that translated loosely means “trust, but verify.” I am waiting for signs that our side has instituted any verification mechanisms to validate the pledges that Kim has made to Donald Trump.

Maybe they’re in there, somewhere, hidden from public view.

Then again, maybe the president of the United States has been taken for a ride.

Still, this first-ever meeting between a U.S. president and a North Korean despot holds enormous promise.

Or … it might all explode.

Now we wait.

International news

What if Obama had done this?

Barack H. Obama once stated he would be willing to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

Those on the political right vilified the president for even suggesting such a thing. He’s naive, unprepared, too willing to surrender to the bad guys, they said.

Donald J. Trump came into office. He launched a name-calling campaign against Kim Jong Un. Then he accepted an invitation to meet with him. The president “canceled” the meeting, but then the two sides worked out their differences.

The right’s reaction? The president deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. He’s brilliant! He’s done the impossible!

Hey, I give the president kudos for meeting with Kim, although I concede that my view on that meeting had changed a bit from a year ago, when I said he shouldn’t meet with Kim. Sill, I hope it produces something constructive and, yes, peaceful!

If only the GOP “base” would have recognized what’s good for their guy also might have worked for his immediate predecessor.

Duplicitous.

International news

Tough to overstate significance of these talks

It is damn near impossible to overstate the significance of what the world witnessed a little while ago this evening.

Two men strode toward each other, extended their hands, with one of them grabbing the other man’s arm with his “off hand.”

The men are Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States, and Kim Jong Un, the dictator of North Korea.

What they said to each other in that private meeting — with no staff members present — remains a secret at this moment. We’ll find out likely as the president wings his way back home aboard Air Force One.

But … the meeting, the shaking of hands, the cautious smiles and courtesy between these men is a very big deal in and of themselves.

The United States and North Korea remain in a state of war. The Korean War didn’t “end” when the shooting stopped in 1953; the ceasefire merely ended the killing. There is no peace treaty. There’s no document that declares peace between South and North Korea.

Today’s monumental first step marks the first-ever meeting between the heads of state between the United States and North Korea.

Critics of the U.S.-North Korea summit say it gives legitimacy to a brutal dictator. Those who praise it say it might open the door to that long-awaited peace treaty — and it well might result eventually in a pact that persuades Kim Jong Un to “denuclearize” his arsenal.

His countrymen and women are starving. North Korea remains a desperately poor nation. Yet the dictator has continued to tons of money into a weapons system the country cannot afford.

Have we seen the beginning of a new era? Is there a possibility that the handshakes, the smiles and the apparent good tidings can produce something — anything! — of substance?

Well, a handshake is a start.

national news

‘Two dictators’ set to meet?

There’s really not much to add to this latest tidbit from the mouth of a Fox News commentator.

Abby Huntsman referred to the upcoming summit between Donald J. Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un as a meeting between “two dictators.”

Oops!

Huntsman has apologized. She just, um, “misspoke.”

Check it out here.

She wrote on Twitter: “Apologized on the show. I’ll never claim to be a perfect human being. We all have slip ups in life, I have many. Now let’s all move on to things that actually matter.”

Whatever you say, Ms. Huntsman. A lot of Americans — millions of us, actually — kind of think she spoke the truth.

International news

Normalization? Sure, but first things first

Donald Trump has placed yet another bargaining chip on the table as he gets set to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

He said he wants to “normalize” relations with the reclusive Marxist regime.

OK, then. Where do we start with that?

Let’s recall the conservative outcry that erupted when President Barack Obama raised the Stars and Stripes over the newly reopened U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba.

Why, we cannot have normal relations with them Cubans. Look at the way they treat their citizens, not to mention that they promote terrorism abroad, they said. That communist Fidel Castro promised to be a reformer when he took over the country in 1959, but he damn sure didn’t live up to that promise, they howled. He made things worse!

Never mind that the Cubans never posed a direct military threat to the United States, particularly after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. Yes, we had that Cuban missile crisis in 1962, but President Kennedy took care of that with a blockade and the threat of a “full retaliatory response” if the Soviet Union used those missiles to attack any nation in this hemisphere.

So, what will the current president demand of the North Koreans?

What’s more, are we going to hear howls from the right wing about the North Koreans’ treatment of its citizens? Or about how the government starves its people while spending billions on a military apparatus that now includes nuclear weapons?

And what about the North Koreans’ direct military threat to this country, and to the South Koreans, and to Japan?

I do believe as well that Kim Jong Un’s regime has been sponsoring terrorism abroad, too.

I am all in on normalizing relations with North Korea. Any effort to create a U.S.-North Korea bond, though, carries more preconditions than U.S.-Cuba relations did.

To think the president says he doesn’t need much “preparation” in advance of his meeting with Kim Jong Un.

He needs to rethink that bit of idiocy.