Some observers suspect that this exchange was a deliberate performance to demonstrate Roh’s bona fides to the North before the October North-South summit.

http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2880428

As it turns out, jokes about Roh Moo-hyun being North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s spokesman aren’t that far off the mark.
Commenter Sonagi has provided a link to the official South Korean version of the Bush-Roh exchange in Sydney, Australia …

However, I think one reason Roh did this, and perhaps one reason why the press isn’t gungho to cover it, is that Koreans see Bush as the most hated man on the planet.

They see him being beaten up constantly by the American press and in American politics, and they see the kind of typical Euro-centric hate that gets spit out over him, and Roh figured Bush was fair game….

He, and Korea, isn’t familiar with the subtleties of Western culture and diplomacy enough to know that a Chirac would not go about busting Bush’s balls in this manner in that setting (but would do it in other ways….).

Even when Chirac was staying Tony Blair must have had a lower class upbringing, he didn’t do it with Blair sitting in an armchair beside him at the time…..

Indeed. As a teacher, I can attest to that truth. You might be familiar with the work of Harvard professor Howard Gardner, who introduced the idea of multiple intelligences. Among the eight different types of intelligence, modern formal education focuses on two, verbal/linguistic and logical/mathematical, over the others, visual/spatial, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal (self-reflective), bodily kinesthetic, and naturalistic (an understanding and appreciation of natural laws, patterns, and order).

I am not a keen follower of Korean politics, so I don’t know Roh as well as you do, but I surmise from his background that he is high in interpersonal and possibly verbal/linguistic intelligences, depending on the strategies he used to memorize his way through the bar exam.

As much as I have always disliked Bush Jr., I object strongly to name-calling him as “stupid” or “idiot.” Like Roh, Bush didn’t get as far as he did by being dumb. Bush isn’t high in verbal/linguistic intelligence, but he probably has brilliant interpersonal skills.

Roh may be many things, but he’s not stupid…

My point, and I think most all of you get this, is that Roh has a high capacity to absorb facts, and would probably earn a high raw IQ score. The pass rate for the Korean bar exam is, what, 3%? Assuming Roh didn’t cheat his way through it (which would explain the contradiction) you can’t deny that that’s a pretty impressive achievement for a guy who never went to law school.

One fact I’ve noticed is how little connection there often is between the ability to absorb fact and the ability to plug those facts into a process of dispassionate reasoning toward a logical conclusion. This is where Roh is obviously weak. Emotion can certainly be one barrier to that process. Roh seems to approach every problem with a solution already derived from a rather skewed hierarchy of emotions. Just as Roh is adept at absorbing facts, he’s adept at throwing out cold, hard facts that undermine his predetermined conclusions.

So I suppose it depends on how you define “stupid.” If you opt for Forrest Gump’s definition, there’s no doubt about it: Roh does and therefore is a stupid man. How ironic for him to be elected to lead a nation that has produced some extraordinarily intelligent and fertile minds. But Roh was also “smart” enough to have made his way (if ever so briefly) to the top of the conniving and treacherous world of Korean politics. His term of office far outlasted this summiting, of course. More to the point, he’s smart enough to realize that he was picking a public spat with the POTUS for a reason.

[typo and run-on sentence fixed]

I concur in our host’s lauding Mr. Bush’s diplomatic demeanor during this jaunt; though frankly I expect that Mr. Stanton’s suggested replacement response to Mr. Roh’s calculated importunacy would have been the needed bracing bucket of icewater.

I would translate the boldface text as follows:

“Same story. Same story, Chairman Kim Jong-il and the South Korean people want to hear a different story.”

Isn’t it telling that he left the North Korean people out of the picture?