Sunshine Death Watch

BUT WOULDN’T THAT BE NEEDLESSLY STRENUOUS?  South Korean conservatives call for their government to close down Kaesong before Kim Jong Il gets around to it.  Personally, I think things are going perfectly just as they are.

THE GRAND NATIONALS ARE REALLY TWO PARTIES, to hear Andy Jackson describe Park Geun Hye’s efforts to keep her people out of President Lee’s government.  Fortunately for them, the left is even more fragmented and rudderless, because that and the fact of incumbency are the only things keeping them in power.  No South Korean conservative of national prominence today exhibits the vision to reset Korea’s great national debate, so all that remain are competing factions of stolid reactionaries and scary radicals.

THE HANDOVER OF OPERATIONAL CONTROL of the ROK armed forces will go ahead as planned in 2012, says the Chosun Ilbo.  I’ll believe that when there’s a ceremony, guidons are passed among generals, there’s a war, and we actually refuse to take over.  If there is one rule about negotiations in Korea, it is that negotiations are never over.

FROM PLOWSHARES TO SPYGLASSES:  “South Korea’s unification ministry on Tuesday closed its bureau on humanitarian aid to North Korea and created a new one to better analyze Pyongyang’s internal politics as part of government restructuring.”  It sounds like someone (and I don’t mean the North Koreans) is taking Andrei Lankov’s advice.