Posted on 08/05/2009 12:51:09 AM PDT by AmericanInTokyo
Now that Laura Ling and Euna Lee are on their way home (to Los Angeles), I have a short list of things I do and do not want to hear from them, starting with any retch-inducing drivel about how well they were treated while they shouldn’t have been in (North Korean) captivity at all. Let’s make that the first thing on our list:
1. Please spare us the Stockholm Syndrome at LAX. Try to remember that you weren’t in North Korea to rob convenience stores, hide a dead hooker, or hand out boxer briefs infected with herpes. If things were so wonderful at that cushy non-gulag guesthouse where you were held — unlike conditions for those North Koreans who offend His Withering Majesty — then go back. This is not a misunderstood state that eventually made contact with its inner goodness by freeing you. It’s a place that starves, terrorizes, tortures, and murders millions of non-famous North Koreans, including potentially everyone whose face appears in the video the North Koreans say they seized from you.
2. The only things we want to hear at LAX are how you really got across the border and a few polite words of thanks for those who helped to free you. Were you abducted, did you get lost, were you lured, or are you just imbeciles who were trying to cover a story you knew absolutely nothing about? Then go home to your families and say nothing else for at least a week.
3. When you emerge, remember why you were there. You were there to tell the story of desperate people like this woman and tens of thousands more like her who will remain forgotten, unmourned, and unmentioned in all of the glowing, shallow, stupid press coverage that will soon follow. They won’t be objects of hope for the great, false diplomatic breakthrough that your release from unjust imprisonment represents to unintelligent people of every race, color, creed, and political persuasion. You can make those people minimally less unintelligent by taking a moment out of the first act of your book tour to remember the refugees and those who are dying in the real gulags.
4. As a corollary to number 3, it’s not all about you. Before you tell your own story, tell the story you went there to tell.
5. As a corollary to number 4, if you actually got people killed by carrying video of them into North Korea, repent what you have done. The ignorance and stupidity that killed them should weigh on you. Telling their stories is a small token of the burden of repentance that you owe them. I would much prefer, of course, that you truthfully clarify that you did no such thing.
6. No Larry King. Not tomorrow, not next week, not ever. Larry King is a tool and a blight upon our society, and your support for him poisons a world in which my children will have to live.
7. Please do not pretend that your experience has made you an authority on North Korea. This doesn’t mean you can’t become one, it just means you aren’t one because of this.
8. Please do not tell us what your release proves about diplomacy or policy, and do not humor anyone who is stupid enough to ask. You’re not policy analysts or diplomatic correspondents. You’re pawns.
9. Please don’t try to redeem the cowardice of Current TV. That is a lost cause.
10. If you did cross the border voluntarily, mortgage your homes now and start writing checks to repay the taxpayers for whatever your ransom cost us.
Ping!
Just one question. Why fly a big plane like that when they could just as well used a G500?
Doesn’t anyone care about the Carbon Footprint this caused?
Concur!
Who’s plane is it anyhow? I never got a shot of the entire aircraft.
Who’s paying for it?
(Just as the two former prisoners on board are probably being "Bill-ed" as I speak!) (Ducking)
rumor has it they landed in Japan briefly, on the way over to Los Angeles (Misawa AB in Aomori). but I believe this was just for fuel, not for full medical check (which they are going to need after five months of North Korea and 11 hours of Bill Clinton).
They worked for Current TV... they were already leftists
11. Please don’t worship Bill Clinton as some sort of hero. He probably went there more for himself than for you.
I am glad we got the hostages back. But what I wonder is what we had to give up to get them back? Was NK given something? Was China given something? It had to be more than just a propaganda coup photo-opt for NK. Or was it a propaganda photo-opt for Barry’s outstretched hand while he sucks on a clinched fist foreign policy debacle that BO has been recieving so far.
HAR!!!
You had the same thought I did.
I am sure the Beezlebubba submitted his own “bill” for immediate reimbursement as soon as the aircraft got to cruising altitude.
He’s not one to miss an opportunity like that.
And yeah, Stockholm Syndrome and all that... those girls must have been in full quaking terror every moment they were there.
Any moment of any day, the nice-nice could have stopped. They know, they HAVE to know, how lucky they are to just be alive.
We need to interview Gail Wallens, Author of “Hostage Terrorist, Terrorist Hostage: A Study in Duality.” :-)
D’oh! Dr. Hasseldorf, not Gail Wallens.
We shall soon see.
I am sure the public pronouncements will begin.
I can almost guess where this is going, though.
Bottom dollar bet here is that one of the two of them will suggest that things would have gone more smoothly if "US and DPRK had diplomatic relations" to work out things that go wrong like this. I am afraid it is coming. And the US MSM will carry that jockstrap to the goal post with vigor.
What a nightmare added to a nightmare.
If they went to any of those Nazi-type camps on the Chinese border, even for just a day, as Western “journalists”, that would be the end of them. They would never be released. I am sure they would die in captivity, no phone calls out, no bodies returned to the USA, no nothing. Very lucky, indeed.
Very powerful statement.
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