Spiff, bilateral talks with North Korea would be a disaster. The US position is that the talks must be multilateral, because there are many interested parties. Japan, South Korea, China and Russia, nations most directly effected by North Korea's nuclear program, and in the case of China, the nation most responsible for this criminal proliferation. If we have bilateral talks, it would reinforce North Korea's position that Japan and South Korea are nothing more than US puppet states and would not advance the cause. Why not? Because we cannot speak for South Korea and Japan.

Do you really think that the agreements made under Clinton represented progress? Spiff, they blackmailed us, took the oil and food we provided and then welched on the deal by going forward with their nuclear weapons program anyway. Do you suggest we do that again? That would be absurd.

The only way to make progress in the effort to rid the peninsula of nuclear weapons is if China insists on it.

You have to understand that North Korea is the most insulated totalitarian police state in the world. It is a criminal state run by mad men. The threat is that North Korea will sell nuclear weapons/technology to Arab states, and indeed, North Korea was a key player in the A.Q. Kahn network, as well as Libya's and Pakistan's program. Of course it's not all North Korea's fault, in that obviously China uses North Korea as its cat's paw to proliferate this WMD technology among criminal states.

So, hopefully, as China liberalizes its markets it will progress politically as well. That progress will be marked by China using its enormous economic influence over North Korea as leverage to induce North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. If we enter into bilateral talks with North Korea, as North Korea insists, it takes the pressure off China and deprives the world of its only real leverage against the depraved North Korean regime run by an alcoholic sex maniac.

What happened to liberals? Once liberals were noted for their commitment to human rights and their criticism of gross offenders. Liberalism has morphed into something which now tolerates and makes excuses for the most egregious human rights violators and directs all its criticism at the United States and Israel. We've come a long way, from a dignified political voice to one too silly to take seriously.



Enjoy the Music. Trust your ears. Laugh at Folks Who Claim to Know it All.