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North Korea is the Most Predictable Regime on Earth. The Real Threat is the Erratic U.S. Government.

September 26, 2017

Korean People's Army (KPA) soldiers walk before the portraits of late North Korean leaders Kim Il-Sung (L) and Kim Jong-Il (R) following the opening ceremony for the Ryomyong Street housing development in Pyongyang on April 13, 2017.Completion of the sprawling Ryomyong Street development, just down a wide avenue from the mausoleum where Kim Jong-Un's grandfather Kim Il-Sung and father Kim Jong-Il lie in state, was repeatedly promised in time for the 105th anniversary of the birth of the North's founder. / AFP PHOTO / Ed JONES (Photo credit should read ED JONES/AFP/Getty Images)
Photo: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images

THE NUCLEAR SHOUTING between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un often seems like a maddening version of whack-a-crazy-mole, in which an unhinged comment by one of them is hastily followed by a lunatic retort from the other. Trump calls Kim “rocket man,” Kim calls Trump a “dotard,” Trump tweets that Kim “won’t be around much longer,” and on and on it goes.

This raises a serious question: Which of these awesomely flawed men is the most volatile and dangerous? The trail to an answer begins with an article that Evan Osnos wrote for the New Yorker about his recent journey to totalitarian North Korea. His “Letter from Pyongyang” reached 14,000 words and was praised as a marvel of reporting that revealed the stark yet impenetrable contours of the world’s most famous nuclear-armed nightmare.

Osnos described how he was met at the Pyongyang airport by a polite government minder who never left his side. He stayed at a special hotel for foreigners that was isolated from the general population. He visited a school where the students made statements that were programmatic. He was taken into Pyongyang’s subway and told that its deep tunnels would be fallout shelters in the event of nuclear war with America. He was not allowed to make a spontaneous visit to anyone’s home.

I was struck by these things because I had the exact same experiences when I made a trip to North Korea — in 1989. Same type of minder, hotel, and school, same prohibition on popping into anyone’s apartment, even the same remark from my minder that the subway would double as a fallout shelter if America attacked.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Obama’s Gift to Donald Trump: A Policy of Cracking Down on Journalists and Their Sources

April 7, 2016

OBAMA’S GIFT TO DONALD TRUMP: A POLICY OF CRACKING DOWN ON JOURNALISTS AND THEIR SOURCES

ONE OF THE intellectual gargoyles that has crawled out of Donald Trump’s brain is the idea that we should “open up” libel laws to make it easier to punish the media for negative or unfair stories. Trump also wants top officials to sign nondisclosure agreements, so they never write memoirs that upset the boss. Trump is so disdainful of free speech that he has even vowed to use the Espionage Act to imprison anyone who says or leaks anything to the media that displeases him.

Actually, that last bit is made up; Trump hasn’t talked about the Espionage Act. Instead, the Obama administration has used the draconian 1917 law to prosecute more leakers and whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Under the cover of the Espionage Act and other laws, the administration has secretly obtained the emails and phone records of various reporters, and declared one of them — James Rosen of Fox News — a potential “co-conspirator” with his government source. Another reporter, James Risen of the New York Times, faced a jail sentence unless he revealed a government source (which he refused to do).

Obama has warned of the imminent perils of a Trump presidency, but on the key issue of freedom of the press, which is intimately tied to the ability of officials to talk to journalists, his own administration has established a dangerous precedent for Trump — or any future occupant of the Oval Office — to use one of the most punitive laws of the land against some of the most courageous and necessary people we have. One section of the Espionage Act even allows for the death penalty.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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