I posit that Bill Richardson is marketing this “friendship” to voters, trading on the embrace of mass murderers to burnish his foreign policy credentials. Otherwise, he’d just be the governor of a small, remote, economically unsuccessful state.

Several months ago, the “americaforrichardson” bloggers promised to contact their candidate to find out whether he has ever brought up the worst death camp this planet has seen since 1945, with the possible exception of Tuol Sleng. That was months ago, yet not a word from them.

Not that I stopped there. I called Bill Richardson’s press secretary to ask him myself. His name is Gilbert Gallegos, and his number is (505) 412-2644. I got an answering machine, so I left a number. No response. So I don’t think I’m out of line in inferring that maybe Bill Richardson either has no idea what Camp 22 is, or doesn’t care about the people dying there as much as he cares about spoiling his presidential campaign by letting principle get in the way. Whatever the reason, he isn’t talking about it. But since I’ve published the number for you and every other reader of this blog with the desire to dial it, by all means prove me wrong. If you can get the answers that Bill Richardson refuses to give me, I look forward to hearing them.

For a few years, Richardson might be excused for not bringing up the worst place on earth with its proprietors. Still, let’s do what you seem to expect and make the absolutely unjustified and unproven assumption that he has. If that has done no good for more than a decade, Gov. Richardson has acquired a duty to demand answers in public. I predict he’ll flunk it, but the opportunity is always there.

Maybe the next time his hosts trot him out to the deck of the Pueblo as the cameras churn, he might interrupt the process of making a propaganda laughingstock of himself by asking, just once, for Kim Jong Il to shut down Camp 22.

Yes, this could kill the mood and lead to some uncomfortable silence. It might give offense to his hosts. But if we can’t reach agreement on a point as fundamental as not killing kids in gas chambers, just how productive a relationship does Bill Richardson really think he’s building? How many decades must pass, and how many more men, women, and children will be murdered in that hell on earth before Bill Richardson thinks the time has finally come to so much as mention it?

That’s where I must criticize you. Kencamp’s actions, however, were fairly immature and uncalled for, and that’s what I think people should be upset about in this particular blog; not what Bill was able or unable to accomplish with an authoritarian regime led by a wildly unstable man.

While I am a supporter of Bill Richardson (thusfar, I haven’t researched other platforms very thoroughly yet), I do realize that this counts as a sort of hole in his record, and I intend to ask him about Camp 22. If I am able to learn anything, I’ll be sure to let you know.

“There is a ton of places where human rights abuses have have happened.”

Then here’s something else you obviously did not read. Please name one place — much less “a ton — where anything on this scale has happened, to this degree of depravity since the Year Zero of the Khmer Rouge, and before that since the end of Nazi Germany. What would history say about a politician who marketed himself based on his warm relationship with Pol Pot or Hitler? Leave aside that Richardson’s claim of credit for this diplomacy is mostly fraudulent.  Bill Richardson’s defenders will eventually be glad for that.

By the way, let us know if you ever find that six-fingered man.