Replies

I would give anything if our candidates were allowed to run segments of the path to 911 as commercials for our side, but I guess that's too much to ask.

Bolton and Rice are doing an excellent job explaining the significance of the UN resolution regarding North Korea. Unfortunately, Fox is having trouble with Dr. Rice's connection. Before they lost her, she pretty much said "now do you see the importance of keeping all of NoKos neighbors together on this matter" rather than just having the US hang out there alone.

I believe you are right on the timing as well as the news cycles over the next three weeks. Those who are crying the blues now may be in for a surprise once this is over.

The White House has the timing down after President Bush hit a low point and turned everything around a couple of months ago, which is also why the Democrats blinked and came out with the Foley scandal early.

"I would give anything if our candidates were allowed to run segments of the path to 911 as commercials for our side, but I guess that's too much to ask."

Hitlery is already having a fit over John McCain basically calling her a liar about what she said about Bubba and NK.
It got really ugly - -I don't think she would've apologized by the outcry made her. It's definitely going to get uglier and uglier before Nov 7 and the '08 elections will be reallly bad.

Hillary Aide Mocks McCain POW Past, Dowd: George 'n Jong - Couple Of 'Immature' Guys,
NY Times-Maureen Dowd/NewsBusters ^ | Mark Finkelstein

Posted on 10/14/2006 6:40:01 AM PDT by governsleastgovernsbest

For Maureen Dowd, politics are mainly personal. This morning she managed to reduce the current Korean conflict to an image of two boys behaving badly. Also, is mocking John McCain's POW past a smart move for the Hillary camp? Dowd offered a stunning insight into the Hillary campaign that suggests it might not be the ready-for-presidential-primetime operation some might imagine.

The main topic of Maureen Dowd's subscription-required column of this morning, Is Chivalry Shivved?, is the war of words between Hillary and John McCain, as the two top presidential contenders recently fired some early shots over the other's bow on the topic of responsibility for the N. Korean nuclear mess.

Dowd managed to work in the DNC talking point of the week: the need for direct talks between the Bush administration and N. Korea. [Former Clinton UN Ambassador Bill Richardson was all over the morning shows today pushing the idea, by the way.] In any case, viewing the N. Korean nuke situation through her politics-of-the-personal lens, Dowd saw things thusly:

"It’s clear, after all, that the North Koreans are acting immaturely in response to W. acting immaturely. They want attention because the Bush administration inexplicably refuses to talk to them. And they know, in the pre-emptive world ordained by nutty Dick Cheney, that the best way to protect themselves from the fate of Saddam Hussein is to actually go nuclear, rather than merely fantasizing and boasting about it."

Just a couple of wild 'n immature guys, that George and Jong. Nice moral equivalence, Maureen. As for the pro-pre-emption Dick Cheney ["nutty" - this is what passes for serious criticism at the Times nowadays?], wouldn't Dowd agree that the world would be a much better place if Bill Clinton had permanently pre-empted OBL when he was handed the chance?

Aside: I was fascinated by this nugget Dowd reports from inside Hillary Central:

Privately, Hillary’s camp was not overly upset by the McCain swipe because it suspected he was doing the bidding of the White House and that he ended up, as one adviser put it, “looking similar to the way he did on those captive tapes from Hanoi, where he recited the names of his crew mates.”

If Hillary and her advisers think it's smart to attack McCain by making snide comments that invoke his five years as a POW, then she's not the smartest-woman-in-the-world political juggernaut some make her out to be.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1719306/posts

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Democrats, McCain & North Korea

Many Americans probably view Sen. McCain's statement that the Clinton administration's 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea was a “failure” as an obvious point. McCain’s comment came after Sen. Hillary Clinton and other senior Democrats were all over the media touting the ’94 agreement as a model for how to deal with the North Korean dictatorship. McCain’s point is a simple one: if we are going to effectively deal with the North’s nuclear weapons program, we have to acknowledge how we got to this point and not make the same mistakes again.

But senior Democrats -- Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Bill Richardson, Madeleine Albright, and John Kerry, etc. – won’t admit the ’94 deal was a mistake. Quite the contrary, as Bill Richardson argued last night on CNN: “The reality is, had we not had the agreed framework with North Korea on nuclear weapons, they would maybe have 50 nuclear weapons today. For eight years they didn't enrich uranium.” Richardson is arguing as if the administration had no other policy options. But that isn’t true. The Clinton administration chose the path of meeting the North’s hostile behavior and violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with further concessions – a path McCain and others vigorously argued against at the time.

In May 1994, McCain catalogued all the North Korean threats and treaty violations, along with the US concessions, that led to the Agreed Framework -- an agreement advertised as freezing Pyongyang’s nuclear program. It didn’t. The North began a secret uranium enrichment program after 1995 and never gave up working on nuclear weapons. Democrats now argue that at least the deal put the fuel rods under the eye of international inspectors before they were kicked out in 2002 on Bush’s watch. Of course, they fail to note that this happened just after the North confirmed U.S. intelligence reports that it had a clandestine enrichment program – one that violated the NPT (they later withdrew from the treaty) and the Agreed Framework. In any event, the failure to demand the speedy removal of the rods from the North was a major strategic flaw in the ’94 deal. Back then, McCain argued that leaving them in place would allow the dictatorship to kick the inspectors out and reprocess the rods at a time of its choosing. Here’s what he wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 1994:

Using sticks such as their threatened expulsion of IAEA inspectors, North Korea has consistently intimidated Administration diplomacy. To divert the United States from punishing his violations of the NPT, Kim Il Sung has raised, then withdrawn his stick, masking his forbearance in the disguise of a carrot….
In fact, North Korea has offered no real concession. The fuel rods that it would use to make weapons-grade plutonium cannot be used until they are less radioactive. The reactor cannot be refueled until the rods have cooled. North Korea's nuclear program is, of physical necessity, frozen….

Although the Administration may attempt to obscure a failure, we will reach a moment when it is apparent to all. That will be when North Korea begins reprocessing the fuel now in cooling ponds into weapons-grade plutonium.

And here we are today. Despite the apparent nuclear test, the missile launches, the proliferation, the secret enrichment program, and all the other history going back over a decade, many Democrats still embrace the '94 deal and still argue for more carrots.

Posted by Daniel McKivergan at 03:13 PM
http://www.theweeklystandard.com/Weblogs/TWSFP/TWSFPView.asp

Our candidates have not begun to run campaign aid yet. Just WAIT! The RNC is not going to lay down and play dead!