Observations on Korea

Sarah Palin referred to “our North Korean allies” on the Glenn Beck show, a slip of the tongue that was deemed newsworthy by CBS News, the Washington Post, and many other outlets. Did those same sources publish gleeful headlines when Barack Obama talked about campaigning in all 57 states? Of course not; Obama is so, you know, brilliant. Everyone who talks in public will occasionally mis-speak; whether slips of the tongue are newsworthy is an editorial decision that is entirely motivated by political loyalty.
More substantively, Michael Ramirez has doubts about the Obama administration’s response to North Korea’s attack on South Korea–let’s have more multilateral talks! Click to enlarge:
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Charles Krauthammer shares Ramirez’s reservations about the adequacy of that approach:

Last night I predicted that the administration would do exactly the wrong thing and call … for a return to the Six-Party talks. Well sure enough, our envoy to North Korea, who’s now in Beijing, last night called for, yes, a return to the talks.
This is after he had a meeting with the Chinese and he announced that it was extremely successful, that we and the Chinese had agreed … on the need for — strong measures? Retaliation? Sanctions? No. On the need for multilateralism. …
To return to the talks is exactly the wrong thing because it’s exactly why — if there’s any logic at all to what’s happened — that’s why Pyongyang has been doing this: (a) the attack with the artillery, and (b) the revelation earlier this last week of this vast, advanced facility for uranium enrichment.
The point is this is a regime in transition, a regime in a succession crisis, that is in economic disaster. The people are starving. It needs [outside] aid because we and the South Koreans and the Japanese have correctly cut it off years ago, and this is the way it [North Korea] beckons us into negotiations where, again, it will offer a phony agreement on some kind of halting of perhaps the uranium or plutonium program, and we will once again subsidize them. …
I think everybody understands that the only outcome of this eventually that will be considered a success is if the regime eventually implodes and collapses of its own inefficiency and irrationality — in fact lunacy in the way it governs itself.
And one way to do that is not to continue what we have been doing for 16 years — [which] is negotiating and periodically caving in to threats like this, or attacks like this, with carrots, meaning keeping the economy of that state, which is really teetering on the edge of collapse, keeping it going…

UPDATE: Heh. Governor Palin, on Facebook, makes the same point I made above, but more humorously.

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