Chosun Ilbo: Kim Jong Il’s Health Failing Rapidly

If he looks like Jagger in Vegas at 4 a.m., there might be a reason:

The health of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is rapidly deteriorating, prompting the hasty decision to name his third son Jong-un as heir apparent, sources told the Chinese press. The Global News, a sister paper of the official People’s Daily, on Thursday quoted a foreign ambassador in Pyongyang as saying that Kim Jong-il’s fragile health made the situation in North Korea “very complicated.”  [….]

A North Korean source in Beijing said Beijing-based North Korean officials from Ponghwa Hospital, which is treating Kim’s illness, are looking to import expensive medical equipment, which has become contraband since the North conducted its first nuclear test in 2006. Pyongyang is also seeking to import an emergency helicopter from overseas. “Kim seems to be in serious condition,” the source added. [Chosun Ilbo]

So, we sanction helicopters and defibrillators, and send them cognac, cigarettes, and processed pork products for the greater humanitarian good.

If your life’s legacy is wrecking your nation’s economy, making it an international pariah/laughingstock, and starving off a couple million of its people, could there be a sense of urgency to do even worse as you feel the reaper’s breath on the back of your neck?

North Korea’s nuclear test and imminent test of an intercontinental ballistic missile is an attempt to reduce the power vacuum and hand over a stable regime to Kim Jong-un, the source speculated.

Since early this year, Kim Jong-il has tripled the frequency of so-called “on-the-spot guidance” to local areas and military units across the country out of impatience to hand over power to his son before it is too late, the source added.

Failing that, you could always order people to make something up:

Thanks to his great leadership the DPRK has greeted an era of new leap and is dashing like the wind toward the eminence of a great prosperous and powerful nation, intensifying the drive to bring about a great revolutionary surge.

His forced march for field guidance is an energetic leadership which instills the source for great innovation and great leap forward into the minds of all the army and people and helps them display their mental power like an erupting volcano and an extraordinary leadership which puts the speed of advance for building an economic power onto the highest level.

His footsteps of forced march for field guidance are immortal ones which build a gigantic monumental edifice to be recorded in history which would take tens, hundreds of years for others to do.  [KCNA]

If this is true, let me add my own wishes for a swift and permanent resolution to General Secretary Kim’s illness (may not be work safe).

Related:   More Kremlinology stuff here.  The military, not surprisingly, is moving in to fill the power vacuum.