Kerry Off the Deep End. Again.

Leave it to John Kerry to go way off the deep end.

Kerry criticized the Bush administration for blaming the North Korean nuclear test on former
President Clinton.

“That is a lie. North Korea’s nuclear program was frozen under Bill Clinton. When George W. Bush turned his back on diplomacy, Kim Jong Il turned back to making bombs, and the world is less safe because a madman has the Bush bomb,” he said.

The “Bush bomb”?

John Kerry really is too silly to be a part of any useful national discourse. That he’s up there raising money for Democrats demonstrated just how irrelevant the party has become to national security.

Let me say this clearly. John Kerry is a flat-out liar. North Korea did not, for a single moment, stop its quest for nuclear weapons under the Clinton Administration. Any suggestion to the contrary is wrong. We have plenty of evidence from the Norks themselves that they pocketed the Agreed Framework of the 1990s and kept on doinng what they intended to do from the very beginning.

But there’s a deeper point here beyond John Kerry’s deception. That is the point of negotiation. For five years Democrats like Kerry have been whanging on the President for not negotiating directly with Kim Jong-Il and insisting that North Korea’s neighbors get involved directly to dissuade him from his course. For the life of me, I can’t understand this criticism except as a way to damage the President politically.

Let’s consider two things. First, you can’t negotiate something that’s not on the table. Kim Jong-Il has made very clear that he intended to get nuclear weapons. It’s been the one thing toward which he tooled the entire economy of his country, to the point where perhaps a million people or so have starved to death. You can not negiatiate something that both sides do not want to negotiate. Kim Jong-Il doesn’t want economic concessions nor diplomatic perks. He wants nuclear weapons and nothing else. You can’t negotiate that away from him because he will not voluntarily give it up. See, contrary to what John Kerry thinks, negotiation isn’t magic. It won’t make someone suddenly give up somthing they’ve wrecked their country to get. It won’t erase a heart’s desire.

The entire reason that the President wanted China, South Korea, Japan, and others to come to the table was so that they could see Kim’s determination for themselves. Finally, this has happened, even though it happened too late to prevent Kim from getting his bomb. Now, at last, Japan is taking punitive actions as is Australia. China is reportedly considering the same thing. Those actions are the only things that will wrest the nuke from Kim’s grasping fingers. Let’s also not forget that John Kerry was the pointman for the cries of “multilateralism” we heard in the year before we went into Iraq. Now, Kerry wants us to act unilaterally. It seems that he’ll endorse whichever approach the President doesn’t take, just to oppose him.

John Kerry is playing a dangerous game here. To call Kim’s bomb the “Bush bomb” is to assign responsibility where it does not exist and to let a brutal tyrant completely off the hook. Then again, letting brutal tyrants off the hook is something that John Kerry does very well. he’s been doing it his entire political career. Just ask the 3 million Vietnamese and Cambodians who died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Ask the couple hundred thousand Marsh Arabs and Kurds who dies at the hands of Saddam Hussein. Ask the million North Koreans who have died thanks to the single-minded neglect of Kim Jong-Il.

“Bush bomb”? How exceedingly silly. The Democrats are well-suited to someone like John Kerry. The party has never met a genocidal tyrant it couldn’t accomodate.

Which reminds me. When was the last time John Kerry said a word about Darfur?

UPDATE: For the details about what the Clinton administration did and did not do regarding North Korea, I refer you to Sister Toldjah’s post today, and a post last week about Jimmy Carter’s peddling of the same lie which includes a pretty good chronology.

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Category: Moonbat Nonsense, Our Foreign Policy, President George Bush