Before I dive into today’s political soupe du jour, I would like to thank everybody who stopped off at my assistance diary last night for ursulafaw. She is very important to me (she pretends to like me!) and we were both blown away by the response. Thanks so much to all who stopped by, for your kind words and encouragement, as well as your help. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
After 3 ½ years, and almost 1,000 diaries, if you don’t know me by this time, you’ve probably got no interest in the subject. But those of you who do know me know I don’t tend to sweat the small stuff. Hell, I don’t usually bother to sweat the medium and semi large size stuff either. Once you hit 60, you’ve had the shit scared out of you so many times, by what appeared to be earth shattering crises that now you only really sweat the super-giant-economy-size stuff, and you even put that on a scale to check it before you get damp on the forehead.
If you regularly read my diaries, you know that this is the attitude I tend to take with the SS Trumptanic, the original inspiration for the classic “Voyage to the bottom of the swamp”. Most of what he does can be undone by a sane President, and we may as well have some fun and mock the hell out of him to take some of the sting out of the situation, kind of an emotional triple antibiotic ointment for our political scrapes and cuts.
But there are some things that just go to the top of the list in the great bugger all of life, and this is one of them. This sent a chill down my spine at the moment I saw it, and it has been scarifying me ever since, and what’s really scaring me is that it started out under the radar, and as of today it is still under the radar, we’re all distracted with Russians, and “secret tapes” and shit. It all started with a Tweet;
This tweet was of course in response to the tragic death of Otto Warmbier, the US college student detained by North Korea for stealing a goddamn poster, and returned to his family in a coma. While there is no doubt that some form of punishment or retaliation for Kim Jong Dicks treatment of an American citizen is warranted, a series of preemptive military strikes, or even one should be so far down the fucking options list that you’d need a miners helmet to find it.
This is dangerous on so many levels that it’s hard to even list them all. Let’s start with the fact that we’re basically flying blind diplomatically. Our Secretary of State is a guy that Trump never met before he was given his name to nominate, and who’s sole purpose in the State Department is to get sanctions on Russia lifted so that his former employer can split $500B with the Russians, and certainly slip him his piece under the table. Tillerson’s first move at the State Department was to gut it of every single person with enough experience to tell him what a stupid shit he was about international affairs. And the Dunce in Chief just pissed off pretty much every useful, worthwhile ally we had with his chest thumping, ego fluffing trip to Europe.
Next, there’s this little backwater burg named The Peoples Republic of China to consider. For sentimental and historical reasons, they take a rather paternalistic view of North Korea. They seem to tend to look at North Korea like a wayward child that China keeps trying to coax back into being a good boy with alternating doses of threats and treats. And China really, really, really doesn’t want a united, democratic, west leaning Korea on its southern border. Taking a guy who is waging a national war on golf at home to Mar-A-Lago for a round on his first visit probably wasn’t the right way to go, and neither was putting Xi officially on notice in the international media that we expect him to solve this little North Korea kerfuffle, or else. And if I’m President Xi, personally, I read that tweet to mean “Nice try kids, now, move outta the way and let the Big Boys show you how it’s done”. The Chinese culture does not tolerate threats, intimidation and insults well.
But the most important aspect here by far is the risk to human lives. According to a recent article in Newsweek, at this moment we have 23,000 US troops stationed in South Korea, most in close proximity to the DMZ. And we have another 39,000 troops stationed in Japan, many in Tokyo. Granted, many of those are near or on board naval vessels that could be moved out to sea, but there is a Marine garrison of over 13,000. There are over 25,000,000 million people who live in and around Seoul, including Americans, and another 37,800,000 who live in and around Tokyo, both well within range of conventional North Korean missiles.
Let’s make this crystal clear, shall we? Kim Jong Un is Charlie fucking Manson with a fat face, and without the scary eyes. He’s as crazy as a shithouse rat. The sole reason for the existence of North Korea as as a personal plaything of the Kim family. If Kim Jong Un can’t have North Korea, then nobody else will either, He is not only fully willing, he is fully capable of creating an Asian Jonestown writ large, but with much greater vengeful collateral damage to the rest of the world.
But one of the scariest things about this is when the insane ones start making perfect sense. When Trump pulled out of the Paris Accord, North Korea dressed him down in a media statement, and it was measured and made perfect sense, especially since North Korea signed the goddamn agreement! And as an article in the Huffington Post today shows, at this point Kim Jong Un has better political sense than Trump does. The regime posted a warning in the state newspaper on Thursday that read in part;
The commentary warns South Korea, a key U.S. ally in the region, against following the lead of "psychopath Trump," saying that doing so "will only lead to disaster."
It also suggests that Trump is facing a "tough situation" at home, including his possible impeachment, and is following in the footsteps of other U.S. presidents in escalating tensions to distract from domestic political trouble.
How rich is that? North Korea is one of the most isolated places on earth, it’s more out of the world loop than the scientific research facilities on Antarctica, and yet even they can see that Trump is out of his fucking mind. Not only that, but they nailed his motivation for trying to create this crisis to the wall with one nail. The closing of the walls around him and his administration made the death of Warmier a very convenient, cynical excuse to create a world class distraction.
There’s just one small problem with this. The distraction isn’t working. Other than a lukewarm media response to the original tweet, everything is still all Trump-Russia, all the time. Threatening another country with military force, especially a long time, despised foe like North Korea is supposed to put it on every front page, and to lead each hours news broadcast, taking Trump-Russia out of the spotlight, and it’s not doing it. This will only frustrate and enrage Hair Furor more.
It has long been said that we are safe because people like HR McMaster and James Mattis are the adults in the room, they will be the stabilizing influence on Trump. Then they had better get up off of their fat, dead, military asses and start doing it right now, because there will never be a better time. And I’ll close this with exactly why I feel this way.
We all said that Trump is full of shit, all talk and no action. Sure, he’s only pulled out of Paris, almost pulled out of NATO, pissed off Mexico, Canada and New freakin’ Zealand among other acts of inspired stupidity. Personally, I do not doubt him of being totally capable of ordering preemptive air strikes against North Korea, if for no better reason than to show that he was serious in the first place. Does that bring China into a general military conflict in defense of North Korea? And if China starts wailing away, does that give Russia an excuse to try to finally rid themselves of the nuclear giant threat of China to their south, while they’re already distracted with North Korea and the US? If we’re attacked by either of them, does NATO honor their pledge to us, even after our behavior? World War One started with the death of one man, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Somehow or other, I don’t think that the creation of World War Three at the hands of a spoiled, petulant man child is the kind of memorial that Otto Wembier’s family is looking for, they have enough grief to deal with right now as it is.