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Kucinich Is the One on the Right

I briefly interrupt my hiatus to give you this to gawk upon:

Kucinich, the Congressgnome from Middle Earth, has made a few appearances in this blog for being the main congressional backer of Christine Ahn’s National Campaign to End the Korean War. Anyway, it disappoints me to see Kucinich nudged out of Congress by non-democratic means, whether those means involve redistricting or commitment proceedings. I feel cheated, somehow.

In other useful idiocy news, I see that John Feffer is reduced to drawing moral equivalence between the Workers’ Paradise and those brigandish Yankees. Oh, he’s going to hear about this on his next visit to Pyongyang for sure:

The international community is rightly aghast at North Korea for spending a fortune on its military when its populace is suffering. Nearly one quarter of North Korea’s population is either starving or at risk of starvation, according to a recent UN report, yet its government pours money into missile and nuclear programs. Such behavior seems to be the height of irrationality. [….]

But the most irrational country of all has been the United States, which was responsible for more than one-third of all military spending and 95 percent of the global increase in military expenditures last year. This remarkable news comes at a time of unprecedented budget deficits and a veritable fever of budget cutting on Capitol Hill.

Yes, the most irrational of all! Why, just yesterday I had to elbow my way past flocks of starving waifs to get into the KFC for a double-down. I don’t know if this my own glass-half-full spin, but for Feffer, this actually represents progress.

My hiatus will continue for a while longer. Thanks for your good wishes. I’m fine, and the family is fine — I’m just busy with other things. Maybe when time permits I’ll start posting on the weekends. Fortunately, the North Koreans haven’t given us much to talk about recently, although I suspect we’re at the beginning of another provocation cycle. The most interesting news has been happening in Libya and Syria. Watch our response in Libya in particular. Despite the obvious differences in the regimes’ military capabilities, that looks like a plausible template for a future crisis in North Korea.

7 Responses

  1. Good to see a post from Joshua. I do have to agree with Feffer that the United States is very much like North Korea, both countries have idiots rationalizing the misdeeds of the Worker’s Party of Korea.

  3. Good to hear from you, Joshua! It’s just not the same without you. I’m glad to know you’re just busy and your absence is not due to serious problems. Looking forward to your return and in the meantime i will continue to hope for the bloody end that the Kim family so richly deserves.

  5. I honestly haven’t been following Representative Kucinich’s utterings on the Korea-US relations, but I did have a chance to meet him a couple years ago when he gave a talk in Hawaii on the merits of a single-payer healthcare system. (A lot of Hawaii hippies came to that talk, including two Baby Boomers in front of me that were the smelliest humans I’ve ever encountered inside of a building.)

    I prefaced a question by saying I hail from Seoul, where we have something of a single-payer system that rests on the efforts of private doctors and private hospitals, and without missing a beat he spouted several somewhat-appropriate Korean greetings. Sort of impressive for being able to just roll off his tongue without thinking about it.

    Like I said, I didn’t talk about Seoul-Washington politics or anything, but he did seem knowledgeable and affable. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have asked him to say, “My precious,” into my iPhone camera.