Mike Chinoy: Kim Jong Il Sank a South Korean Warship, Ergo We Should Negotiate With Him Now

Mike Chinoy was an absolutely, positively objective CNN reporter until he wrote a book accusing the Bush Administration of sexing up evidence of North Korean uranium enrichment to wriggle out of the first Agreed Framework. Poor Chinoy. Before his book even went to print, samples submitted by North Korea to the State Department began to test positive for highly enriched uranium, and in due course, Meltdown wasn’t just Chinoy’s title, it became .

But because people like Chinoy are even harder to deter than Kim Jong Il, he now argues that the right response to the premeditated sinking of a South Korean warship is to sit down with them, presumably to ask them what it will cost to make them keep quiet for six more months. Because it worked so well before, right? Of course, this assumes that the North Koreans even want to sit down with us, except for their demand for access to the wreck of the Cheonan to do their own “independent” investigation. Chinoy, with his characteristic talent for finding hope in unlikely places, takes this demand seriously.

It is at moments like this that we should all pour out libations to Zeus for a president who, thus far, has not taken the counsel of men like Mike Chinoy. It’s why I feel a need to defend President Obama’s North Korea policy, for all of its flaws, from conservative critics who assume that Obama appeases Kim Jong Il (and that George W. Bush did not). They ought to be more careful in their criticisms. If this President sees no point in pursuing a tough policy anyway, he might just opt for a weak one.