Korean summit? It’s all about the ‘spin’

U.S. and Korean leaders will try to talk...

Assuming someone doesn’t say or do something stupid in the next few hours that causes somebody to go storming out of the room and bringing the summit between the United States and North Korea to an end – this is the week that the two sides will talk.

The nations that were at war back in the early 1950s and which ended in a stalemate that for decades has created the potential for the shooting to start up again are going to have their leaders try to talk out their differences.

... about peaceful relations in coming days

WHAT WILL COME out of all this? Who’s to say!

If anything, it doesn’t matter one iota what is actually done or said by officials of either side.

This truly will be an event about the political spin. Both sides are going to be looking for some sort of occurrence that they can distort into a story putting themselves in the best light.

When it comes to the officials from North Korea, I’m sure they want something to happen that they can claim to be the end of the war – with the North prevailing. It won’t matter that nothing will actually change. They want to be able to say they defeated the attempt of capitalism and Western imperialism to chase them out of power.

AND IF NOTHING truly occurs along those lines, they’ll want to be able to say it does.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials have their own agenda going into this gathering (which will take place in the early hours of Tuesday – our time). It may be over and done by the time we wake up Tuesday morning.

Or maybe the sides will talk late into the night (which will be about lunchtime, our time, on Tuesday)?

Remember how the 'Laverne & Shirley' stars both used to claim top billing because of how their names were positioned? This weekend will be filled with lots of equally ridiculous rhetoric by both Trump and Kim

What President Donald Trump wants to gain out of all this is something that he will be able to spin into stories of what a high-and-mighty, all-powerful negotiator he truly is.

TRUMP WANTS US to think that he’s the guy who was able to sit down face-to-face with North Korea leader Kim Jong-Un and knuckle under to his almighty aura.

On the surface, Trump says he wants to get North Korea officials to abandon the arsenal they have built up throughout the years of nuclear weapons – which, quite frankly, are the only reason anybody pays attention to the impoverished Asian nation whose attempt at Communism is so isolationist that there’s really no reason any other part of the world would want to be bothered with it.

Yes, it really is about his ego and that Nobel Prize – he will forevermore be bitter that his predecessor, Barack Obama, received the prize for his efforts to try to bring peace to the Middle East. I’m sure if it were possible, Trump would order the prize’s revocation from Obama.

Since that’s not possible, he’s out to get his own. His backers already are proclaiming him the man who “ended” the Korean War, and I’m sure the ideologues here will be more than willing to distort whatever actually happens into a story that backs their pre-summit rhetoric.

IN ALL HONESTY, I’m skeptical that anything of significance will happen as a result of the talks taking place in Singapore in coming days. Even Trump himself has made statements warning that long-term change will take years to achieve.

The kind of image Trump dreams he can make a part of the past in Pyongyang

Meaning we can’t proclaim him the ultimate failure if nothing has changed by Friday. Although nothing will stop the smarty-pants-types amongst us from pondering which of the two world leaders has the most ridiculous hairstyle.

This week’s activity is about talk. And talk is good. It’s better than isolationism keeping the sides apart to the point where our ignorance of each other results in somebody doing something stupid (always risky when nuclear warheads are involved).

And if it really is nothing but talk, I can’t help but remember the old cliché; “Talk is cheap!”

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EXTRA: June 12 is back on, for now

So it seems that June 12, in Singapore is back on. President Donald J. Trump said Friday following an hour-long-plus meeting with aides to Kim Jong Un of North Korea that he's once again willing to meet with that nation's leader in hopes of reaching some sense of agreement with that rogue nation.

What will actually come out of such a gathering? We'll have to wait and see. Actually, we'll have to wait and see if the gathering actually takes place. Trump could easily have another hissy fit in the next week-and-a-half and cancel the session once again.

I DO HAVE one thought bopping through my mind; do the ideologues who perpetually rant against the United States trying to reach a sense of peace with Cuba now ease up their rhetoric since they're so eager to see Trump get his "Nobel Prize" for bringing peace with North Korea -- a nation we technically remain at war with some seven-decades after the shooting stopped.

Not likely. Ideologues rarely care about fact or logic when making their arguments.

So does this mean the ideologues now resurrect their talk that Trump is worthy of the Nobel Prize (which they think he's entitled to because former President Barack Obama managed to win one for his efforts related to the Middle East)?

And how peeved would they become if it turns out the Nobel types think Kim's actions are more worthy of the prize? Not that I'm saying they will be -- having two irrational leaders trying to achieve peace always has the potential to create chaos. And I don't mean the humorous kind that the International Organization of Evil of "Get Smart" used to engage in.

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Trump has long way to go before we ought to think of him as Nobel winner

Reading through all the rhetoric being spewed in recent days with regards to the Koreas, one has to wonder how delusional the conservative ideologues amongst us truly are.

Lots of ritual in last week's meeting of the 2 Koreas leaders. Any substance?

Either that, or just how insecure are they in the degree to which they will say anything intended to try to legitimize this Age of Trump that our society is now in.

IT WAS REGARDED as a significant event last week when the leaders of the two Koreas – Moon Jae-in of the South and Kim Jong Un of the North – actually met, engaged in a lot of ceremonial ritual, talked for about 30 minutes, then signed off on an agreement that technically ends the Korean War of the 1950s.

Or at least says that neither North nor South Korea regarded the war as ongoing,

As far as any gunfire or bloodshed is involved, that conflict between the two Koreas (with the sides propped up by the United States and China) ended with a cease-fire in July 1953.

The fact that there was never a formal agreement signed has always been regarded as more of a quirk of history, rather than one of significance. Although for those who cite the instability of Kim and his relatives who have governed North Korea for decades, it has had some fear that a moment of stupidity on someone’s part could resurrect that Cold War-motivated military conflict.

BUT INSOFAR AS our own political scene is concerned, there are those who are seriously suggesting that the headline ought to have been, “Trump Ends Korean War.”

Many of them also are suggesting that the U.S. president ought to receive credit for bringing the two sides together and ought to get a Nobel Peace Prize.

They think history ought to be crediting Donald J. for bringing an end to a conflict that I honestly suspect most people today only think of as the motivation for the M*A*S*H film and television series. Actor Jamie Farr’s “Corporal Klinger” in drag might be the war’s lasting image.

TRUMP: He really believes it's all about him

If you get the impression I think President Trump is spewing a whole lot of nonsense on this issue, you’d be correct.

IT SEEMS THAT the ideologues remain seriously miffed that the Nobel Committee back in 2009 gave their Peace Prize to then-President Barack Obama. Perhaps they think it’s a matter of “equal time” that their guy get the same prize as well.

Admittedly, that prize to Obama was one that has questionable merit. Obama had engaged in significant rhetoric about nuclear nonproliferation and the merits of peace between the Western world and the Muslim world. It had been hoped that giving Obama the prize would add credibility to his talk.

Although what happened was the distaste ideologues had for Obama meant they became openly hostile to the idea (just like they despised everything he proposed), and little of lasting value came out of that era.

But anybody who’s serious (which the ideologues amongst us rarely are) has to admit Trump has had very little to do with any lasting peace in that region of the world. If anything, his trash talk about North Korea has escalated tensions, and his general attitude toward the rest of the world may be what keeps any lasting peace from being achieved.

KEEP IN MIND that the agreement formally ending the Korean War would still have to be approved by U.S. and China officials. It could take months, if not years, before the Korean conflict (1950-53) is officially over.

There’s also the fact that the Koreas agreement does not include a resolution of one long-significant issue – the degree to which the North ought to have its own arsenal of nuclear weapons. Although the Washington Post reported Sunday that the North said it would dismantle its main nuclear test site sometime next month. Whether that can be settled in the yet-to-be scheduled talks that Trump hints he’ll have with Kim.

Sad that some may think this is real

So while the ideologues amongst us are writing chapters celebrating Trump in history and trying to strongarm people into giving him the Nobel Peace prize, I think the head of North Korea’s national intelligence service may have a more accurate perspective.

While acknowledging “changing norms,” Kim Yong Chol said, “It feels embarrassing to be applauded just for shaking hands.”

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Improving our foreign relations likely would require dumping the isolationist nitwit chief executive we now have

What are the chances that the recently-completed Winter Olympic Games held in South Korea will kick off a process that could someday result in improved relations with the Communist North Korea?

TRUMP: Gets in the way of solutions?

Probably about the same as the notion that Mexico will some day take on the cost of actually building that ridiculous barricade that President Donald J. Trump has long fantasized about erecting along the U.S./Mexico border!

AS MORE EVIDENCE of how vacuous our nation’s president is when it comes to foreign policy, both issues are in the news these days, with Trump’s stubborn streak standing out as the reason nothing is likely to happen on either front.

Take the ongoing fight between the United States and Mexico over the border wall – the one that Trump foolishly thinks would have any impact on the flow of people between the two North American nations and which he insanely thinks the Mexican government would pay to have built.

Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s president, was planning to make an official visit to Washington, D.C. sometime in March to have a one-on-one meeting with Trump. But Peña said he’s cancelling such a trip because of a 50-minute telephone conversation the two presidents had last week.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that Peña doesn’t see the point of antagonistic rhetoric, and Trump let it be known he’d likely use such a Mexican presidential visit to the White House as yet another excuse to spew his trash talk about how those crooked Mexicans were going to be forced to pay the construction cost of a border barricade that many Mexicans feel is blatantly offensive.

THE TWO OF them haven’t had an official meeting, unless you count the face-to-face meeting the two had at an international conference held in Germany.

It also seems there won’t be any real progress made in terms of relations between the two because Trump seems to value having antagonistic relations as a way of getting his ideological nitwit backers all riled up in support of him.

PENA NIETO: Won't meet w/ Trump

Get them to “Blame Mexico!” for whatever, and maybe they won’t pay attention to how little of worth is being accomplished by a Trump presidency, or how much harm is being caused.

Which is how I view the whole situation of the Koreas, where on Sunday South Korea President Moon Jae-In had a meeting with North Korea general Kim Jong-Chol – with hints it could be the first step toward talks that could include the United States.

NOT THAT THE United States had any interest in being part of the token gestures made as part of the Olympic Games in Peong-Chang – Vice President Mike Pence went out of his way to not be a part of anything.

Now I can comprehend the need to be wary – I’m sure that whatever actually occurred from any future talks, North Korean officials would try to spin it into the capitulation of the evil U.S. But talks have to begin somewhere.

And considering that we’re long hearing horror stories about how a North Korea with nuclear weapons and rockets capable of unleashing them on U.S. cities, you’d think this would be a priority.

But I suspect that just as Trump wants a Mexican “problem” so his politically-ignorant followers can have someone to complain about, he also wants a North Korean “villain” to keep people distracted from the many inactions of his presidency.

KIM: Who'd be the crazier in a meeting w/ Trump?

BECAUSE WITHOUT THESE gross exaggerations, we’d have to focus our attention on the fact that while Trump claims to have repealed 67 federal regulatory actions while only enacting 3 new ones, the New York Times reported this weekend that it’s an exaggeration.

More spewing of news as “fake” as anything the National Enquirer ever concocted.

That is, unless you’re all worked up over their recent How the Philly Mob Fixed the Super Bowl report?

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Wishing we, the people, could pick up a history book every now and then

I don’t doubt that North Korea leader Kim Jong-un has a screw or two loose in his

Wishing this were just a debate ...

mindset – he may very well believe his place in history is to be the guy who gives the “go” order that unleashes a nuclear weapon on a city or two within the United States.

Although when I hear our nation’s president, Donald J. Trump, spew out rhetoric about “fire and fury” being unleashed against North Korea, it makes me wonder which world leader’s instability is more likely to cause the problem?

 

... over who has the sillier haircut?

AND I DON’T particularly care if such rhetoric plays well with the 46 percent of the U.S electorate that actually voted for Trump to be president. That only proves our overall ignorance of history and world events.

For all I know, Trump may well want to give the order to unleash an attack on some part of the world so as to enhance his credentials as a world leader in the same way that Kim thinks he’s appeasing the rest of the world by saying he’d only consider use of nuclear weapons on the United States.

I also don’t doubt that Trump’s rhetoric is being played in such a way that Kim is making sure everybody currently trapped into living within North Korea thinks that Trump is the ultimate demon who is threatening to annihilate their country.

Similar to how Fidel Castro had a generation of Cubans thinking the reason their nation had become so impoverished was because of generations of U.S. presidents imposing imperialist policies through the trade embargo that in the end wound up depriving our nation of economic opportunities more than it hurt Cuba.

Kim trying to top Fidel on crazy scale? Image provided by Library of Congress collection

YES, I’M VIEWING this whole situation developing between the United States and the nation with which we technically have been at war with for nearly seven decades with some trepidation. Although the broadcast pundits who now are spewing cheap talk that we’re approaching a sequel to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 may be overstating it.

We’re not there, yet. Although I’m wondering if the cooler heads who need to prevail for such a situation to never develop will wind up being drowned out by the nonsense talk of Trump and Kim.

I heard one such pundit make a comment Wednesday about how it is possible that U.S. military interests could “take” North Korea in a fight. It’s just a matter of how much carnage we’re willing to put up with, and how much we’re willing to sacrifice South Korea (our ally and a nation in which we have a military presence) in the process.

I think too many people are willing to ignore that last aspect, even though they shouldn’t.

BECAUSE IF WE want to be realistic, we would have “taken” North Korea a long time ago if it were at all practical. But the fact that China would not want to see a reunified Korea if it means that the part of it historically allied with itself were seen as the “loser.”

And I definitely don’t want to see a situation where we have a U.S./China conflict provoked by a long-forgotten military conflict of the early 1950s. Cold War politicking has the potential to create too many headaches.

Yes, I use the phrase “long-forgotten” to describe the Korean conflict because I really don’t believe most people have a clue about it. They either get it confused with the later actions in Vietnam, or they think it’s something about hospitals and “M*A*S*H” on television.

NOT what Korea was about!

Which means they’re dredging up comical images of actor Jamie Farr in his Scarlet O’Hara dress or swinging a purse while carrying a rifle on guard duty.

CERTAINLY NOT AN image with any bearing in reality. And certainly not one that should be taken into account by anybody with a hand in setting our public policy.

Which is why I do take some comfort in the comments of people like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis who says North Korea needs to “stand down” in its desire to get a usable nuclear weapon. We can only hope that such sensibilities prevail, and that fantasies of South Korean military troops marching in to Pyongyang to occupy the capital of the North do not.

It reminds me of a professor I had in college who liked to say of Harry Truman’s use of atomic weapons to end the Second World War that it was “Harry Truman 2, Rest of the World 0.”

I’d hate to think that we’re headed for a day when his line will have to be amended to read “Truman 2, Kim 1 and Trump 1.”

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Can you libel North Korea? Is it all a film industry plot for attention?

It is one of the old gags of being a reporter-type person who covers a lot of crime activity – “You can’t libel the mob!”


No matter how critical one is in the details they write about organized crime, what are the gangsters going to do – file a lawsuit and testify under oath that you’re wrong?

I COULDN’T HELP but remember that thought when I read an Associated Press dispatch from Seoul, South Korea, about how the North Korea government late Sunday accused the United States of spreading “reckless” rumors about its alleged involvement in a hacking of Sony Pictures computers.

The wire service reported that a National Defense Commission statement said officials planned “our toughest counteraction” against the United States, which it said is a “cesspool of terrorism.”

It also said the North Korean government has proof that it had no connection to the computer invasion that wound up disclosing sensitive information about Sony and stirred up enough attention and fear about the upcoming film “The Interview” that Sony officials decided not to release it at all.

Now I’m not going to claim to have any specific detail about U.S. foreign policy or North Korean affairs. Although it wouldn’t shock me to learn that the people who actually did break into the Sony computers are not actual government officials, but sympathizers of the Communist regime that we technically have been at war with since 1950 (although no shooting has taken place since 1953).

ALTHOUGH I DON’T expect anyone to seriously offer proof of that. Because that would involve people, possibly even Kim Jong Un, to have to “take the stand,” so to speak, and tell the truth.

It’s easier for them to spew trash talk. Just like much of our own government’s rhetoric that has blown a potentially third-rate film up into an international incident. We’re talking about putting North Korea back on the list of nations that engage in “state-sponsored terrorism.” Considering that we’re going to have to remove Cuba from that list because of the plans to restore diplomatic relations, it means there’s a vacancy to be filled.

For those of you who have been hiding away in a cave (perhaps the one that Osama bin Laden once used to hide from the U.S. military), this is the film meant to be a comedy about two men hired to assassinate Kim.

But it is a comedy because the two would-be killers are portrayed as a pair of bunglers and the film tells the story about all the things that go wrong during their escapade.

IT MAKES “GET Smart” sound downright intellectual. It sounds like something that should have starred Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels (the crew from “Dumb and Dumber”).

It’s a stupid laugh, and if the North Korean government had any sense, they’d use the film against us as evidence of just how far our society has declined. Instead, they took it seriously and are reacting like nitwits, which had enough people connected to the film industry in this country concerned that the release of the film on Thursday was cancelled.

Which gave us that “Saturday Night Live” sketch this weekend where Michael Myers’ “Dr. Evil” character lambasted Kim as a buffoon and a disgrace to evil leaders the world over.

It also has Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., talking about trying to get a print of the film somehow (I’m not sure if he has that kind of connections) so he can show it during the fundraisers he will have to have in coming months if he is to have enough campaign cash to get re-elected in 2016.

HOW MANY PEOPLE are now going to pay $2,000 or so per ticket to watch an allegedly verboten film? How much unwarranted attention is “The Interview” going to get?

Then again, perhaps Myers’ involvement was appropriate. Because this whole saga has taken on the inane character of a storyline from one of the Austin Powers series of parodies about James Bond-type films.

Which actually makes the conspiracy-theory portion of my intellectual makeup wonder if Sony is eternally grateful for the attention that caused them to stop the film’s distribution.

When it does finally get out, people will think they’re making a political statement by going to see it. Instead of just watching what could have turned out to be a corny story that would have been out of the movie theaters shortly after the coming of the New Year.

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It’s all a stunt on so many levels

I’m sure in a certain sense, the government of North Korea believes it has dumped all over the United States and achieved a significant political victory in the eyes of the world by being willing to grant the release of two U.S. news broadcasters to former President Bill Clinton.

Perhaps they think that they are tweaking the mentality of the segment of our society that is most outraged by the very existence of Kim Jong Il – which in many cases is the same segment of society that also has its hang-ups about the existence of Clinton himself.

THEY GAVE CLINTON a victory on the international diplomacy stage, which will bother those people who would prefer that Clinton and his wife just wither away from the public eye – rather than remaining as an ex-president and incumbent secretary of state.

So it will be curious to see just how this gets spun by those elements of our society that will be pleased to have the two broadcasters of U.S. citizenship (but Asian ethnic background) returned home.

Will it get as absurd as the people who want to believe that the timing of the release of hostages in Iran in early 1981 was done because of fear of Ronald Reagan? I don’t doubt that they were held in captivity for as long as they were because of a desire to embarrass then-President Jimmy Carter.

But to listen to those people who want to praise the very memory of Reagan, it was all his doing (even though I’m convinced his existence had nothing to do with that issue).

NOW I REALIZE there aren’t direct parallels between the release of those hundreds of Embassy workers and other U.S. citizens who spent about a year-and-a-half in the captivity of Islamic extremists, and the current situation involving two ladies who were arrested for their work and spent the past month with a Korean criminal conviction (and prison sentence at hard labor) dangling over their heads.

I have enough sense to realize that the real reason for their arrest was a Korean regime in the northern part of the nation that didn’t particularly want the outside world looking at the way things go in that country.

So after having the two ladies locked up in a Korean prison and ignoring the overtures of the U.S. government to let them free (including a plea from Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton), it took an outside effort by the former president to get something done.

Now as some observers will note, there probably was some sort of outside understanding before the project was undertaken. I doubt Bill Clinton would have made a long-distance flight from the United States to North Korea if he didn’t have a pretty darned good chance of succeeding.

AS FOR THOSE of you who want to create jokes about Clinton making a long-distance flight just to hook up with a couple of chicks, keep them to yourself.

Anyway, it took less than one full day from the time Clinton arrived in Pyongyang to the time his airplane took off for Los Angeles, with Laura Ling and Euna Lee in tow.

The two worked for Current TV, a cable news outlet that supposedly is a more balanced alternative to the reporting that at times borders on propaganda from outlets such as Fox News. Coincidentally enough, Current TV is an entity being overseen by one-time Nashville newspaperman (and Vice President) Al Gore.

Which adds yet to the factor that giving in to Clinton creates the potential for embarrassment.

GORE, CLINTON (AS in Hillary), even President Barack Obama, all were unable to get action on the issue of letting the two broadcasters go free.

Yet retiree Bill Clinton gets action in one day.

I suppose it’s similar to all the times when the Rev. Jesse Jackson has gone into nations that are hostile toward the United States and manages to achieve some results on a particular issue.

Does this make Bill Clinton the 21st Century equivalent of Jesse Jackson? It could.

BUT IN THE end, I don’t think it matters all that much.

Because the bottom line is that Ling and Lee are free, no longer having to face the possibility of actually having to serve a 12-year prison sentence for trying to sneak into the country so they could get an unhindered view of what is truly happening in the nation that all too many of us think of as merely being part of the punch line from old M*A*S*H television show reruns.

And now we can put the two in the same category as Roxana Saberi, the freelance writer and broadcaster who endured her own ordeal in an Iranian jail earlier this year before being set free. In short, it’s going to mean a lot of book deals, and hopefully some accurate accounts of life in those two countries within the next couple of years.

At the very least, it would be nice to see something reported that indicated the level of nonsense being spewed by the North Korean government when their official statements said the release of Lee and Ling was evidence of “humanitarian and peace-loving policies.”

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