Yeah, he would have been great…we’d be driving cars that get 80 miles to the gallon but cost $85,000 to buy, and a gallon of gas would be costing us six dollars or more…
while he flies around in his jet, burning more fuel in a year than I’ll use in a lifetime…and owns his three homes, SUVs and…well, he’s a dumbass hypocrite…unless you think frequent PRIVATE jet travel is good for the environment, and that we should all be able to own three homes apiece with square footage in each beyond an average single home for a typical American.
But, hell…trees grow back, right? And wetlands aren’t really necessary, so we have plenty of space to build on, right? Hypocrite.
I don’t know… Are you done making excuses why it was unpossible for anyone to have actually done (or do) anything about the problem other than waging total war against them?
I’m especially fond of Franks and Studds…unbelievable behavior, and NO CONSEQUENCES.
However, I can also truly say…the current administration sucks! Iraq is a freaking nightmare! The Republicans are hypocrites and deserve to be voted out as the majority in Congress!
Feel better now? ;) It would be nice if we could agree that there’s enough shit spread around the halls of Congress/Washington to cover a fairly large, and bipartisan, portion of the American pie.
No point. The Lefty Squad has arrived. Reason has left the building and Bush Bashing is the order of the forever. It’s been my practice to bail when the echo chamber shows up - none of them are going to change their minds about anything and they can only waste my time, not vice versa.
“My view is we ought to treat North Korea as a danger, take them seriously. No question that he has signed agreements and didn’t stick by them. But that was done during — when we had bilateral negotiations with him, and it’s done during the six-party talks.”
Translation: We treated them like a potential danger and opted to negociate with them directly using trade and agreements* and they opted to ignore the agreements they signed and go nuclear. Now, we’re using the six-party talks to bring the region into it and no longer treating them like a potential danger, but an actual one.
Hallmark of Clinton’s term (and since that’s somehow endlessly interpreted as me saying it’s bad, I’ll clarify and say it simply was a fact. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. In NK, it didn’t.)
The US Government has announced that it will release $95m to North Korea as part of an agreement to replace the Stalinist country’s own nuclear programme, which the US suspected was being misused.
Under the 1994 Agreed Framework an international consortium is building two proliferation-proof nuclear reactors and providing fuel oil for North Korea while the reactors are being built.
In releasing the funding, President George W Bush waived the Framework’s requirement that North Korea allow inspectors to ensure it has not hidden away any weapons-grade plutonium from the original reactors.
So, yeah. That article is four years old. Bush has nothing to do with this? Clinton’s appeasement may have been appeasement, but he didn’t waive inspections.
Good points indeed. I missed that post somehow. It makes a lot of sense though. It also goes hand-in-hand with the US not being able to police the entire world. I do agree that it shouldn’t be up to the US to handle all these situations (and as such I don’t hold the current administration responsible for anything more than egging them on, and dropping programs that may possibly have stalled/slowed their march to nukes).
Originally Posted by scharmers
It all boils down to : “WHOOPS, WRONG DICTATOR.”
Whoops, you just killed 1 million North Koreans, 600,000 South Koreans and 90,000 Japanese instead of 40,000 Iraqis.
Bullshit. We just send in a mercenary squad of a Swedish guy who’s good with weapons, an American guy who can take a lot of damage, and a Korean girl who speaks the local languages. Problem solved.
No idea, but I hope so – maybe the nuke-test will be the catalyst to unite them.
New NY Times update which may or may not signal a change in China’s NK policy:
China said today that it would support appropriate “punitive actions” against North Korea in response to its announcement of a nuclear test, a harsher step than it has been willing to take in the past.
The country’s ambassador to the United Nations, Wang Guangya, told reporters that “there has to be some punitive actions, but also I think that these actions have to be appropriate.”
He said that the council needed to have a “firm, constructive, appropriate but prudent response to North Korea’s nuclear threat,” according to news services.
It was not clear whether Mr. Guangya’s remarks meant that China would support the resolution proposed by the United States, which calls for international inspections of all cargo going in or out of North Korea.
And check out this shit:
In Tokyo today, Finance Minister Koji Omi said that Japan would consider imposing more financial sanctions on North Korea, while two other cabinet members said Japan might consider imposing a trade embargo.
And Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yasuhisa Shiozaki, declared today that his government was considering “all possibilities,” while officials in China and South Korea were saying that they would oppose any use of force.
Meanwhile, the Yonhap news agency in China quoted an unnamed North Korean official who said that his nation could fire a nuclear-tipped missile unless the United States acts to resolve its standoff with the regime in Pyongyang, according to The Associated Press.
“We hope the situation will be resolved before an unfortunate incident of us firing a nuclear missile comes,” the official said. “That depends on how the U.S. will act.”
I lived in South Korea for three years, and the animosity between Korea and Japan will not go away any time soon.
Japan ruled Korea from the early 1900’s until the end of WWII…and when I say ruled, what I really mean is “raped, pillaged, abused, killed, enslaved, etc.” In fact, hundreds of thousands of Korean women became “comfort women” to Japanese soldiers, both in Korea and in Japan.
And the comfort was of a purely “you’re a forced prostitute…open your damn legs, bitch” variety. Horrific stories…absolutely horrible. Japan refuses to pay any compensation or handle the issue squarely.
There are lots of reason for Koreans to hate the Japanese…I don’t blame them a damn bit for the bile still in their system. Many Chinese also hate the Japanese as well. Wonder why? Read about the rape of Nanking…such horrific stuff, that the author of the book COMMITTED SUICIDE. Unbelievable atrocities and millions dead throughout China when Japan invaded them. Again, Japan refuses to squarely deal with what they did in Nanking or elsewhere in China.
A long and uncomfortable history in northeast Asia, and it won’t go away with just one (admittedly major) event.
