More Trash at the NY Times

Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times has shown us his total incompetence again. I’m pretty sure that my writing in the first grade was more logical than Kristof’s writing on his best days. But that’s why he’s working for the Times. Kristof’s premise is that President Clinton had all but solved the North Korean problem and Bush came along to screw it up.

North Korea made one or two nuclear weapons around 1989, during the first Bush administration, but froze its plutonium program under the 1994 "Agreed Framework" with the Clinton administration. North Korea adhered to the freeze on plutonium production, but about 1999, it secretly started on a second nuclear route involving uranium.

Kristof seems to be smoking whatever it is that Times’ writers enjoy so much. Although it’s astonishing that anyone thinks that Kim Jong Il kept his side of the bargain on this deal, let’s assume that Kristof is right and N. Korea only cheated starting in 1999. There’s a slight math problem here – does he expect Bush to have intervened then as governor of Texas?

…Bush refused to negotiate bilaterally, so now we have the worst of both worlds: That uranium program is still in place, and the plutonium program is churning out weapons material as well.

Bilateral negotiations didn’t do a whole lot for Clinton, so I’m not sure why anyone thinks they would work this time around.

But Bush seems frozen in the headlights, unable to take any action at all toward North Korea. American policy now is to hope that Kim has a heart attack.

It sounds like Kristoff doesn’t care if North Korea cheats again. He simply wants to give an appearance that we have done something – even if it means blackmail. Or perhaps Kristof is advocating taking military action against North Korea (right…).

The irony is that Bush's policies toward North Korea have steadily become more reasonable over time. Perhaps by the time he leaves office, he'll finally be willing to negotiate seriously with the North Koreans.

So Bush has become more reasonable over time? Let’s see: Bush advocated 6-party talks when he first learned of North Korea's deception and now he advocates – 6-party talks. Kristof couldn’t cite a single example of change in Bush’s policy because it has not changed (unless you count the change from Colin to Condi, but I highly doubt Kristof would consider Condi “more reasonable.”)

At what point does the NY Times become officially known as fiction?