Anju Links for 22 July 2008

BUT WE MUSTN’T POLITICIZE THE OLYMPICS:  To further its pre-Olympic “cleansing” policy, China will shut down the bridges to North Korea until the Olympics are over.  Those who promised us  that the Olympics would mean more openness and liberalization have a lot of  refugee “cleansing,” oppression, censorship,  arrests, and  a tidal wave of state-inspired  Lebensraum rhetoric  (see comments) to answer for. 

IF IT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER (PT.1):  Pressed by a reporter last week, White House  Spokeswoman Dana Perino  said that North Korea was still a member of the Axis of Evil (can these people even appease competently?).   I’m sure I speak for very few when I say how much I  look foward to  State’s explanation of  how those Axis of Evil sanctions will keep slave-made North Korean goods off Wal-Mart shelves or help us restore the kind of pressure that’s needed to secure  any actual  disarmament. 

IF IT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER (PT.2):  North Korea assures us that the killing of South Korean tourist Park Wang-Ja by one of its soldiers was not premeditated (meaning, instead, that this was just a part of North Korea’s natural cycle of death).  The North Koreans have even taken the elaborate step of reinventing the soldier who killed Park as a 17 year-old  female.  As I predicted, this has resulted in no mass protests.   What if the shooter had been an American?

JAY LEFKOWITZ HAS CANCELLED a trip to the Kaesong Industrial Park for the second time in almost exactly two years.  Conspicuously absent from the story is an explanation of why that happened, or any comment from the muzzled Lefkowitz, who is one of the few administration officials who still even talks the talk.  One wonders whether the North Koreans, sensing how completely Lefkowitz has been marginalized in Washington, simply withdrew his permission to visit.