Feed Me, Seymour

It’s a fine line between extortion and aggressive panhandling.

Inexplicably, extortion and outright terrorism have failed to produce a financial harvest (until now, a perennial success) to make up for the agricultural kind (since 1993, a perennial failure). Suddenly, a slightly more obsequious North Korea is … begging for South Korea to resume those Kumgang Tours and for the U.N. to keep its commitments on the delivery of food aid. If there’s one word in the North Korean vocabulary more amusing than “brigandish,” it’s “commitment.”

South Korea, according to a somewhat impeachable source, isn’t going for the Kumgang reboot. Park Wang-Ja was not available for comment.

Leave aside the obvious questions about why North Korea can’t just buy some food with the money in the yacht fund, the booze fund, the Mercedez fund, or the empty skyscraper fund: why won’t they at least accept food aid from the World Food Program’s single largest donor?