The Candidates on North Korea (Fred Thompson)

Whew.  I had expected these  primary things to make this project a little less ambitions.  I expected wrong.  Next:

SIMON: Well, here’s our final question, though. As you probably know, I’m sure you know, Ambassador Bolton has become very critical of the Bush administration since his resignation from the United Nations. He wrote a book about it and he’s made a lot of public statements. Do you think — and implying that the Bush administration is essentially walking backwards on the war on terror. Do you think he has a point?

THOMPSON: I will say this. I do share his concern about a deal with North Korea. North Korea is a country that’s never kept a bargain it’s ever made. Any deal with them has got to be based upon verification. It’s a country that it may be impossible to carry out verification. They’ve lied to us before about that. And now it looks like from all we can tell and from statements that current members of Congress have made that they can make due to the classified nature of what they’re seeing, my guess is that North Korea is now outsourcing a lot of its stuff to Syria. And we saw the Israelis launch a strike against the Syrian location and the word is that they were in the process of building a plant there and with Syrian assistance perhaps.

I hope the administration is not so intent on making a deal on its way out that they get into the situation that the Clinton administration did with the agreed framework when North Korea was giving us here and taking back over here, you know, behind the scenes.

At the end of the day, we’ve got to have verification before we start rewarding them again. We’re giving them current rewards for future promises. It’s never worked before with them. And I’m skeptical of it.  [Pajamas Media]

That’s a close second to McCain’s answer in my book, but Fred didn’t say anything about human rights and doesn’t have much other information of interest on his site.  You can watch the whole thing on video here.  By the end of the day, we’ll know if his campaign is viable.  Conventional wisdom is that if he doesn’t win in South Carolina, he’s finished.