Hey, I wanted to hear more about those pressure points.

Watch my good friend Sung Yoon Lee, appearing on the PBS News Hour, speaking in edited paragraphs. I can hardly write an edited paragraph. In my native language. How does he do that?

Oh, and some guy named Victor Cha was there, too. Cha and Lee seem to agree that North Korea’s recent brazenness is related to the succession, and inventing some cred for Kim Jong Eun, which also sounds plausible to me even if I don’t think Jong Eun has any real power. Lee is quoted in the New York Times as speculating that all of this may be leading up to making a big event of January 8th, the birthday of our new porcine prince. The thing is, the North Korean people seem to loathe Jong Eun so much that at the end of this succession process, he’s probably going to end up being much more useful as fall guy than as a figurehead. In fact, it’s occurred to me that that’s exactly where this whole succession process could be headed.

My regret here is that Prof. Lee was just getting to the interesting part at the end. It’s tragic he didn’t get 30 more seconds to elaborate before a national audience.