It’s Tuesday, December 20th, 2011….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, Melanie Kirkpatrick details….

The World’s Most Repressive State

President George W. Bush famously told journalist Bob Woodward, ‘I loathe Kim Jong Il.’

A few minutes after the news of the death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il flashed across computer screens on Sunday night—Monday morning on the Korean Peninsula—I received an email from a North Korean defector. The man, who is now living in Seoul and is a Christian, was exultant: “God blesses all of us,” he wrote. The defector’s sentiments will be shared by many, especially his long-suffering countrymen.

The best-known aspect of Kim Jong Il’s legacy is a nuclear North Korea. During his rule, which began in 1994 after the death of his father Kim Il Sung, the younger Kim accelerated the nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs initiated by the elder Kim. He went on to proliferate both technologies to Iran, which today would not be on the brink of being a nuclear power if it were not for his assistance.

Kim Jong Il will also be remembered as a master manipulator of the Western powers, especially the U.S. (A distinction, we would maintain, only made possible by the willingness of those involved to be manipulated!) The history of the failed denuclearization agreements says it all. On Pyongyang’s part, it is a history marked by lies, broken promises, and clandestine programs. On the part of the U.S., the history is marked by gullibility and wishful thinking. North Korea’s path to developing nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them would have been far more arduous had Bill Clinton and George W. Bush not accepted Kim Jong Il’s promises of future good behavior in return for economic benefits.

The late dictator leaves another legacy too: presiding over the world’s most repressive modern state. Kim Jong Il’s name belongs on the list of the most evil tyrants of our time.

President George W. Bush famously told journalist Bob Woodward, “I loathe Kim Jong Il,” a statement for which he was widely mocked in diplomatic and academic circles. Mr. Bush made this remark in 2002, when the world was just beginning to learn about the horrors of life in North Korea thanks to the testimonies of the few people who had escaped and reached safety in the free South.

In the decade since 2002, there has been a flood of escapees. From these men, women and children we have a glimpse of Kim’s human legacy: a brutalized and starving people, whose access to food is controlled by the state and dependent upon their perceived political reliability; the world’s most corrupt society, where the rule of law is nonexistent; and a gulag-like system of prison camps, where some 200,000 people are incarcerated, often with three generations of their families, for such “crimes” as listening to a foreign radio broadcast, reading a Bible, or disrespecting a portrait of Kim Jong Il or Kim Il Sung. Refugees frequently use the word “hell” to describe their country, and it is impossible to disagree.

Here are just two examples of Kim Jong Il’s reign of terror—one monumental in its impact on human suffering. First is the famine of the mid-to-late 1990s, which killed two million to three million North Koreans. This blood belongs on the hands of the dictator himself, who diverted resources to military programs rather than buy food for his hungry people, and who refused to introduce agricultural reforms that would make possible better and sustainable food production. He was only too willing to let millions of his countrymen die in order to pursue his nuclear ambitions.

The other example has to do with the defection, in 1997, of a high-ranking official, Hwang Jong-yop. Kim Jong Il’s initial response was to round up 3,000 of Hwang’s relatives—including people who had no idea they were related to the defector—and ship them off to the gulag. But his obsession with retribution did not stop at North Korea’s borders. He spent the next 13 years—until Hwang’s death from natural causes in 2010—dispatching a series of assassins to Seoul to attempt to murder him.

Kim’s personal eccentricities were legion—the ever-present boiler suit, the bouffant hair style, the elevator shoes. His personal appetites were legion too, akin to those of Nero or other famous hedonists of yore. In recent years, after his doctor reportedly ordered him to avoid his preferred cognac, he drank only Chateau Margaux, an expensive French Bordeaux. He was a great movie buff whose personal library was said to include thousands of films. In 1978, he arranged to have his favorite South Korean actress kidnapped from a beach in Hong Kong and brought to Pyongyang to star in North Korean movies.

There is one more notable aspect to Kim’s human legacy, and while it would be overly optimistic to make too much of it, it is nevertheless a hopeful one. In recent years, according to testimonies by refugees, more and more North Koreans have started to question Kim’s rule. The discontent doesn’t yet reach the level of organized dissent, but refugees report that there is a growing hatred of the Kim family dynasty. The hatred is more widespread than one would suppose in a state where most sources of information are controlled and where the regime propagates a cult of Kim family worship.

The hatred extends to Kim Jong Il’s son and announced successor, Kim Jong Eun. In recent months Kim Jong Eun is believed to have ordered a vicious crackdown on North Koreans who try to leave the country and on family members they leave behind. Recent roundups of people caught in possession of foreign DVDs, listening to foreign radio broadcasts, or using cell phones that can call outside the country are also laid at his feet.

None of this bodes well for the North Korean people in the near term. It looks like Kim Jong Eun can be counted on to do everything he can to perpetuate his father’s tyrannical regime. In this, he will have the support and assistance of the elite ruling class, which benefits from the status quo.

In dealing with the new dictator of North Korea, however, the Western democracies would do well to reconsider the policies that failed to move the now-dead dictator. In this, they should heed the advice of the late Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and democrat.

In the last decade of his life, Havel took up the cause of the North Korean people and urged the world’s democracies to make respect for human rights an integral part of any discussions with Pyongyang. He wrote in 2004: “Decisiveness, perseverance and negotiations from a position of strength are the only things that Kim Jong Il and those like him understand.”

These qualities, absent from the West’s dealings with Kim Jong Il, deserve to be paramount in its dealings with his heir.

This next item, also from the WSJ, reinforces Melanie’s mindset:

Breaking the Kim Dynasty

Now is not the time for another round of Western bribes.

Kim Jong Il’s sudden death rids the world of one more murderous dictator, but the tragedy is that it probably will not soon rescue the North Korean people from the national dungeon he sustained for 17 years. The West can help that day come sooner with a change in its strategy.

The Western media liked to mock Kim’s bizarre lifestyle and habits as a movie buff, but this only gave him a human quality that he never showed to his own people. Kim was a Stalinist to the end, along with Castro the last of the Communist leaders to resist any kind of reform.

After North Korea’s founder Kim Il Sung anointed his son as successor in 1980, Kim Jong Il proved his fidelity by striking at South Korea. In 1983, he ordered a commando attack on South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan, who was visiting Rangoon. Mr. Chun was unharmed, but two cabinet ministers and 15 other top officials perished. Four years later, the younger Kim orchestrated the bombing of a South Korean commercial plane that killed 115 civilians.

During the famine that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the death of his father in 1994, Kim Jong Il dismantled any institutions that could form a power base for a potential challenger. He instituted a version of martial law known as the “military first” ideology, gutting the ruling Workers Party, and he expanded the already considerable network of forced labor camps.

Kim maintained power by promoting a sense of siege aimed at the U.S. and its “puppet regime” in South Korea. Demonstrating loyalty to reunification on Pyongyang’s terms and to the Kim family that personifies this goal is the key to advancement in the North. Nuclear weapons are crucial to this agenda, both as a bargaining chip to seek cash from the West and as a deterrent to any attempt to promote regime change. That last point is a warning about the horrendous long-term cost of letting Iran get the bomb.

Kim’s death is producing the inevitable hopes that his successors will change all this and seek an opening to the world. The immediate likelihood is remote. Power has been centralized in the Kim family, including Kim Jong Il’s sister and her husband, who may play the role of regent during the coming years.

Kim only began to install his youngest son, the 20-something Kim Jong Eun, as successor in the last few years, but he has also quickly picked up the terror mantle. North Korean propaganda suggests that the youngest Kim was behind the unprovoked sinking of a South Korean navy ship and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island last year. A measure of the regime’s danger is that South Korea went on high alert upon news of Kim’s death, and the White House issued a sensible statement pledging to maintain stability on the Korean peninsula and support America’s allies in the region.

Yet these moments of transition are also when a syndicate like the one that rules North Korea may face internal leadership disputes. It’s possible that as the Kim gene pool gets shallower, the young Kim may not be able to maintain control the way his father and grandfather did. The West can exploit this tension by staying united in isolating the regime until it changes.

The wrong approach is to believe the regime will change with another round of cash and other carrots. In recent days Washington and Seoul have been tempting the North back to the six-party talks on denuclearization with offers of humanitarian food aid. But the lesson of the past 20 years is that this helps the regime by giving it currency or other aid to pay off its members and by enhancing its international stature.

The Clinton Administration tried and failed with its Agreed Framework of 1994, and the Bush Administration tried and failed in its second term with Condoleezza Rice’s ploy to remove North Korea from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror. North Korea pocketed everything, lied about dismantling its nuclear plans, and kept on proliferating. A replay might enhance Kim Jong Eun’s stature inside the regime.

Dictatorships tend to split when they are under economic and diplomatic pressure. The best policy going forward is not to offer new inducements in exchange for more promises of the kind Kim Jong Il always broke. China has wanted to keep the North as a client and buffer state, but this may be a moment when it too begins to rethink its interests in Pyongyang.

Whatever China’s choice, the U.S. needn’t be complicit in maintaining the Kim dynasty. Better to wait for meaningful signs from the North that it wants to change. This would mean dismantling its nuclear program or opening to the world in a far larger way than it ever has. Until that day, the West should keep sanctions and other pressure on North Korea and seek to liberate as many of its people as possible.

All of which begs the question….

Is Kim Jon Eun Ready to Lead North Korea?

Well….about as ready as another unprepared, unqualified would-be-dictator we know….

….which doesn’t bode well for the NoKos!

Here’s the juice: U.S. policy towards North Korea has been a complete and abject failure.  Not because of any particular skill on the part of the Thugocracy in Pyongyang, but rather the ineptitude and outright stupidity of a series of hopelessly naive negotiators.

Every bit of the oil and fuel aid was used by the Kim to buy the continued loyalty of the NoKo military.  The vast majority of the population suffered from exposure and starvation in silence….millions permanently.  A long line of America’s “best and brightest”, including Condi Rice and Jimmy Carter, have yet to grasp the nature of the evil the Kim dynasty represents.  In this case, Team Tick-Tock’s only another link in the chain.

Speaking of the Great Vacationer, as Katie Pavlich reports….

Thanks Taxpayers: Obama’s 17-Day Vacation to Cost $4 Million

As many Americans continue to struggle to find work, forgoing Christmas presents and vacations this year as a result, Barack Obama is headed to Hawaii on Friday for his 17-day long, $4 million vacation courtesy of taxpayers.  The Hawaii Reporterbreaks down the numbers by category:

TRAVEL: $3,629,622

The biggest expense is President Barack Obama’s round trip flight to Hawaii via Air Force One, a cost the GAO office estimated at $1 million in the year 2000. Contacted today, the GAO confirmed there is no report the independent office affiliated with Congress has prepared since 2000 to operate Air Force One and Air Force Two.

However, the U.S. Air Force provides the most current numbers of $181,757 per flight hour. Travel time for Air Force One direct from Washington D.C. to Hawaii is about 9 hours or $1,635,813 each way for a total of $3,271,622 for the round trip to Hawaii and back.

HOTEL: $72,216

The President’s staff and White House Press Corps stay at one of Hawaii’s oldest and most elegant hotels, the Moana Surfrider. Hawaii Reporter confirmed they are again staying there this year. Besides its stunningly beautiful view of Waikiki, and its traditional architecture, it is one of the most pricey hotels in the state.

Government rates are $177 per night, but that only is available during certain times a year.

LOCAL TAXPAYER COSTS: $260,000

Local police over time for the president’s visit has historically cost Oahu taxpayers $250,000 but may be more expensive this year with the extended vacation.

The total cost (based on what is known) for a 17-day round trip vacation to Hawaii for the President and his family and staff and security is an estimated $4,113,038. (Which doesn’t include the additional costs for another round of separate travel by the Empress Marxelle.)

Out. Of. Touch. Remember, Ronald Reagan stayed in Washington D. C. for Christmas so his security staff could be with their families.

The difference?  The Obamao’s don’t have staff, they have servants….a diminished status shared by the rest of America!  We’re left to assume our pain is his gain!

Following up on yesterday’s item in the Crime Blotter, we learn….

Florida College Resists Call to Suspend President

Trustees of Florida A&M University rejected calls to suspend the school’s president Monday amid a scandal over a marching-band member’s death following a hazing incident. The decision came as scrutiny of the university, and violent rituals on college campuses generally, continues to mount.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott set off a furor when he called last week for James Ammons, the president of the Tallahassee university, to be suspended. Students marched on the governor’s mansion, and some lawmakers and Florida A&M alumni complained that the governor, who is white, was meddling in the affairs of the historically black state university. (Beating a fellow band member to death; it’s a Black thing….you wouldn’t understand!)

“The board wants to reaffirm its authority…to govern the university,” said Chairman Solomon Badger III, in a conference call with trustees Monday accessible to reporters. “We will stand firm against outside influence, regardless of how well-intended.” (Particularly the influence of the white governor of Florida!)

The board previously had voted to reprimand Mr. Ammons for his handling of the incident. In a statement released after the board’s announcement Monday, Mr. Scott said, “Like all other Floridians, I will abide by the decision made by the Board of Trustees.”

….The incidents have attracted scrutiny of the “Marching 100,” the university’s famous marching band that has performed at the Super Bowl and President Barack Obama’s inauguration parade. Robert Champion, a 26-year-old drum major, collapsed on a bus in Orlando after a hazing incident following a football game Nov. 19 between Florida A&M and Bethune-Cookman University.

Mr. Ammons fired longtime band director Julian White and suspended four band members. The university board later stayed those disciplinary actions pending the results of a criminal investigation.

On Friday, the medical examiner’s office for the Orlando area declared Mr. Champion’s death a homicide, caused by internal bleeding resulting from blunt -force trauma. The death of the previously healthy Mr. Champion occurred within an hour of a hazing incident, according to the coroner’s report. “The autopsy revealed extensive contusions of his chest, arms, shoulder and back,” the report stated.

After the report was released, Mr. Champion’s family, which has said that it plans to sue Florida A&M, issued a statement saying that it wanted quick justice. “We don’t want to stop the music,” the family said. “We want to stop the hazing.”

Violent hazing within marching bands at historically black colleges and universities like Florida A&M, Alabama A&M and Southern University has been regarded as a problem for years. In the wake of Mr. Champion’s death, Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Fla., decided to reopen an investigation into an alleged hazing incident in its marching band this fall, according to spokesperson Meredith Rodriguez. The university’s president wanted to ensure “the case was handled effectively,” said Ms. Rodriguez in a statement.

….Hank Nuwer, a Franklin College professor who has been researching and writing about hazing for decades, said hazing is a problem everywhere, but it has been particularly intractable among black collegiate marching bands. Those who discuss the secret hazing are often punished and ostracized, he said. “Snitches get stitches,” he said. “It’s a real gang mentality.”

Were Robert Champion’s death an isolated, unfortunate incident, it would be a tragedy.  That colleges and universities, historically-black or otherwise, would knowingly allow such a culture of torture and physical abuse to continue is beyond a travesty; it’s criminally-negligent homicide….regardless of how well-intended.

In a related item, turning to today’s Tales From the Darkside, we learn from Townhall.com that if you….

Want Answers About Fast and Furious? You’re a Racist

When in doubt, pull the race card. Attorney General Eric Holder has been under a lot of pressure lately about his role in Operation Fast and Furious, the Department of Justice program that put 2,000 high-powered weapons into the hands of ruthless Mexican drug cartels. Two federal agents and more than 300 Mexican citizens have been killed as a result. Holder claims he didn’t know about gun-walking techniques being used in the operation until the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, telling House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa on May 3, 2011 he had known about Fast and Furious for “a couple of weeks.” However, five memos addressed directly to Holder, detailing Operation Fast and Furious, are dated July and August 2010, nearly a year before Holder admitted he knew under oath. The Justice Department continues to stonewall the investigation into the lethal operation and still hasn’t given the Terry family details about their son’s murder one year later.

Now, as the possibility of a Holder impeachment looms,he’s pulling the race card as the New York Times’ Charlie Savageadamantly defends him:

For nearly three years, Republicans have attacked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on national security and civil rights issues. For months, they have criticized him over a gun-trafficking investigation gone awry, with dozens of leaders calling for his resignation. Last week, more than 75 members of Congress co-sponsored a House resolution expressing “no confidence” in his leadership.

As Mr. Holder’s third year as attorney general draws to a close, no member of President Obama’s cabinet has drawn more partisan criticism. In an interview last week, Mr. Holder said he had no intention of resigning before the administration’s term was up, although he said he had made no decision about whether he would continue after 2012 should the president win re-election.

“I think that what I’m doing is right,” Mr. Holder said. “And election-year politics, which intensifies everything, is not going to drive me off that course.”

But Mr. Holder contended that many of his other critics — not only elected Republicans but also a broader universe of conservative commentators and bloggers — were instead playing “Washington gotcha” games, portraying them as frequently “conflating things, conveniently leaving some stuff out, construing things to make it seem not quite what it was” to paint him and other department figures in the worst possible light.

Of that group of critics, Mr. Holder said he believed that a few — the “more extreme segment” — were motivated by animus against Mr. Obama and that he served as a stand-in for him. “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” he said, “both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this stomach-churning image from Bill Meisen:

Hey, we’ve seen a lot of guys in dire need of a manssiere….

….but rarely anyone requiring a “DD”!

And finally, since we’re on the subject of farces, we’ll wrap things up with the “Your Tax Dollars At Work” segment, and this report from the Washington Examiner:

EPA Funds Dance Classes Against Air Pollution

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has just awarded a $25,000 grant to the Repertory Dance Theater in Salt Lake City to educate youth about the impacts of air pollution. According to the EPA release, (They don’t even bother to HIDE it!) the theater, “uses the arts to educate Salt Lake City youth about the impacts of air pollution” and will produce “demonstrations and movement classes” for elementary school children.”

“Community-based action and participation in environmental decision-making are critical to building healthy and sustainable communities…By supporting local environmental justice projects in under-served communities, we are expanding the conversation on environmentalism and advancing environmental justice in communities across the nation.” said Lisa Garcia, EPA’s senior adviser to the administrator for environmental justice. (You read it right; we’re over $15,000,000,000,000 in debt….yet the EPA can still afford an “Administrator for Environmental Justice!)

The Dance group website boasts that the organization, “continues to build bridges of understanding as it attempts to demystify the art of dance, making it a meaningful and vital part of the culture of the great state of Utah.”

The EPA also announced it is seeking applicants for $1 million in environmental justice small grants expected to be awarded in 2012. The grants enable non-profit organizations to conduct research, provide education, and develop solutions to local health and environmental issues in communities overburdened by pollution.

Seriously….if you thought THIS was bad, look how the EPA’s spending the rest of their budget:

http://www.epa.gov/international/regions/sa/japer.html

No cost savings to be realized here….move along!

Magoo