Two American journalists remain imprisoned in North Korea by the Communist regime of Kim Jong-il. Earlier this week, the state news agency announced that Euna Lee and Laura Ling admitted in their closed “trial” that they had crossed into the country illegally, with the intent “to isolate and stifle the socialist system of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by faking up moving images aimed at falsifying its human rights performance and hurling slanders and calumnies at it.” Not coincidentally, this revelation came hours before President Obama was to meet with South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak to discuss ongoing provocations by the North.
Yet at the press conference that followed the meeting, President Obama said nothing about the plight of the two Americans. (He did say that North Korea’s integration into the community of nations “can only be reached through peaceful negotiations that achieve the full and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, and his press secretary added that the President “hopes that [North Korea] will return to the path that they were on in taking steps to denuclearize the Peninsula.”
How has the administration responded to the arrest and twelve-years’-hard-labor sentence meted out to Lee and Ling? President Obama and numerous aides have beseeched Kim Jong-il to release the pair on “humanitarian grounds”–an abject appeal that outwardly accepts the justice of their circus trial. On Monday, the State Department went into full damage-control mode to insist that, contrary to a hint by Secretary of State Clinton, it was unlikely that the administration would do much about a congressional request to reinstate North Korea on the list of terror-sponsoring countries. The New York Times reports that the administration is considering dispatching a special envoy to negotiate Lee and Ling’s release, but has so far kept its cards close so as (the Times suggests) not to “harden the North’s position.” Governor Bill Richardson, who is schooled in the art of diplomatic etiquette, explains that “talk of an envoy is premature, because what first has to happen is a framework for negotiations on a potential humanitarian release. . . . What we would try to seek would be some kind of a political pardon.”
This is where the coddling of rogue regimes leads you–tens of thousands of troops on North Korea’s border and supervision over the country’s fuel and food imports all reduced to sound and fury, signifying nothing. So Lee, who has a four-year-old daughter, and Ling, who has an ulcerous condition, can languish in a North Korean prison camp awaiting ransom.
Hart was being charitable.
Hart was simply displaying the cultishness that characterizes today’s Left (which, apparently, still likes to call itself “liberal” on occasion), as is Wolfe’s book–liberalism is all things good, all we believe to be; conservativism is all things bad, everything that isn’t us. Obama himself is nothing but “not-Bush-in-every-possible-way,” a kind of cultural hologram. This is why they consider everything to be permitted to them, and it’s important to note that power is making them worse.
Saul’s successor keeps on playing the liar.
You’ve gotta love those guardians of nuance on the left!
Hart is still sour because the American people called him on his philandering and found him wanting.
Well, I guess technically, there’s nothing in “tolerant, open and charitable advocacy” that implies “intellectual integrity.”
i think conservatives, intellectuals and intellectual conservatives should be grateful that THIS is one way ‘liberals’ define themselves and their opposition….
…even some of the smugger and more self-satisfied ‘liberals’ will wince at this…
JED – You should add “self awareness” to the list.
SmokeVanThorn — Indeed. Reminds me of an aphorism from an old acquaintance, who had a store of them: “The unexamined life is a much better position from which to tell others what they should be doing.”
Hey! Richman! Well said. Ambrose Bierce could not have said it better. In fact, he might have said it just that way, though he might have left off the last sentence. He was writing for San Franciscans back in the days when they could sail ships, build bridges, and generally take care of themselves. Before, in other words, they became “elite.”
And while there may be some members of that accursed tribe among your readers, you should probably assume that your readers generally are intelligent enough that, having been presented with an example of egregious boorishness, they don’t need to be told why it merits some degree of disapprobation.
One disturbing trend is the
I can’t help but notice that Hart’s quoted definition of “liberalism” is a pretty decent description of a Goldwater/Reagan conservative, and the antithesis of everything Obama/Pelosi/Reid. Where does he find such a “liberal” in any geographic location and at any date after Winston Churchill “walked across the aisle” in the early part of the last century?
“…mutant, pre-Enlightenment, neo-medieval militarists.” I am going to see about getting some T-shirts made up using that. Perhaps “I am a mutant, pre-Enlightenment, neo-medieval militarist. And Proud Of It!”
They would probably sell like hotcakes at the next SCA tourney.