Chuck Asay gives us “A Brief History of North Korea’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Program”.

Giving foreign aid to countries because we’re afraid of what they’ll do with a nuke doesn’t curtail proliferation, it promotes it. Rogue states get what they need to prop up the dictator, and thus the lives of its citizens are made to be anything from miserable to fatal for the coming years. In the meantime, said rogue state still continues to work on obtaining nukes. There’s never any penalty to be paid, other than a nasty-gram from the UN, so there’s no real reason to live up to the agreement.

This is textbook codependency. We’re enabling the very actions we’re hoping to prevent. And when we try to cut off the free ride, others accuse us of being cold-hearted. The world is acting like the wife of an alcoholic man. And neither situation is healthy for the parties involved.

Technorati Tags: North Korea, Chuck Asay, nuclear bomb, codependent

I watched most of the Fox News Sunday interview by Chris Wallace of Bill Clinton. A couple of observations.

1. Clinton could have easily parried any perceived attack on his administration with a calm, to the point defense of what he did and why he did it. Instead, he spent most of his time getting downright accusatory of Chris Wallace and Fox News and blowing the whole thing out of proportion. Methinks he doth protest too much. Not what you’d expect from the type of politician he’s been in the past.

2. When Clinton asserted that Wallace hadn’t asked these questions of Republicans, I just knew the blogosphere’s fact checking machine was going to kick in to high gear. Patterico’s got the goods. Does the “evil” Rumsfeld count? That should quell any argument about the interview being some sort of right-wing hit piece, but of course many on the left will not be deterred from that pre-conceived notion.

Technorati Tags: Fox News, Chris Wallace, Bill Clinton

Hugo Chavez, a man embraced by Cindy Sheehan and Harry Belafonte, and who gives free PR to Noam Chomsky, spoke before the United Nations yesterday. His words, both then and later, ought to give pause to those who make common cause with him. They also ought to give pause to those who vote for people who have made common cause with Chavez.

“The devil came here yesterday,” Chavez said, gesturing to where Bush had stood during his speech on Tuesday. “He came here talking as if he were the owner of the world.” He later said he was referring to President Bush when he spoke of the devil.

Chavez said it still smelled like sulfur. Well, as James Taranto notes, he who smelt it….

Chavez then made the sign of the cross and appeared to pray for a moment. Where is the American Left on this? If Bush had some something like this, even in jest, they would be outraged over it. Either they would decry his outward religiosity, or complain that he was using it to make a joke. As far as I know, though, this little demonstration has passed without serious comment by Chavez supporters here.

Rep. Charlie Rangel did come out against Chavez’s remarks in general when he said,

You don’t come into my country, you don’t come into my congressional district, and you don’t condemn my president. If there’s any criticism of President Bush, it should be restricted to Americans – whether we voted for him or not.

That was great of him to say, and I’m glad to hear this come from across the aisle. I don’t think Rangel would have said he was a “supporter” of Chavez before this.

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The President of the United States couldn’t get the UN to recognize the problem in Darfur, or do anything about it. Perhaps an actor can.

It’s been said that Hollywood’s hottest marriage is the one between actors and Africa. That’ll be true Thursday when Oscar winner George Clooney is scheduled to address the United Nations Security Council on the crisis in Darfur. That’s right, not some small media conference, but the actual Security Council. Hosted by John Bolton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, the briefing is organized by The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity (EWF), which recently established a Darfur Commission of Nobel Laureates. Clooney visited Darfuri refugees last April to use his celebrity clout to raise awareness of the plight of refugees in the war-torn region, considered the 3rd biggest humanitarian crisis in the history of the UN. According to the Oscar-winning actor, the US, the UN and the world’s policies on Sudan is failing. “If we turn our heads and look away and hope that it will disappear then they will-all of them, an entire generation of people. And we will only have history left to judge us,” Clooney has said about the tragedy.

Hey, don’t blame the US, George. We’ve been trying to get the UN to recognize genocide when it sees it. And you wouldn’t want us doing anything unilaterally, would you? That is “why they hate us”, isn’t it?

All kidding aside, it’s good to see Clooney working with John Bolton and trying to get the UN–paragon of virtue that it is–to wake up and smell the Kofi coffee. It’s sad that it has to come to this (and sadder yet if this is the main reason things start happening), but it’s better than nothing.

Technorati Tags: United Nations, George Clooney, Darfur, genocide, Elie Wiesel

With a hat tip to James Taranto, it’s time to bust the myth that we had all this store of goodwill built up because of what Muslim terrorists did to us on 9/11, but Bush squandered it when he went to war. From the London Telegraph, Anne Applebaum writes:

But it’s also true that this initial wave of goodwill hardly outlasted the news cycle. Within a couple of days a Guardian columnist wrote of the “unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world’s population”. A Daily Mail columnist denounced the “self-sought imperial role” of the United States, which he said had “made it enemies of every sort across the globe”.

That week’s edition of Question Time featured a sustained attack on Phil Lader, the former US ambassador to Britain – and a man who had lost colleagues in the World Trade Centre – who seemed near to tears as he was asked questions about the “millions and millions of people around the world despising the American nation”. At least some Britons, like many other Europeans, were already secretly or openly pleased by the 9/11 attacks.

And all of this was before Afghanistan, before Tony Blair was tainted by his friendship with George Bush, and before anyone knew the word “neo-con”, let alone felt the need to claim not to be one.

There was outpouring of sympathy, to be sure. But to confuse that with some sort of policy shift is just wrong.

The dislike of America, the hatred for what it was believed to stand for – capitalism, globalisation, militarism, Zionism, Hollywood or McDonald’s, depending on your point of view – was well entrenched. To put it differently, the scorn now widely felt in Britain and across Europe for America’s “war on terrorism” actually preceded the “war on terrorism” itself. It was already there on September 12 and 13, right out in the open for everyone to see.

And really, was the breaking of the UN sanctions by the likes of France and Russia really a result mostly–even partially–of some sort of lost love for the US? Please. It was selfish interest, plain and simple, by economies that couldn’t handle the loss of a trading partner very well.

Anne does note that American may have turned folks off with our “go it alone” mentality (although a coalition of 20 groups in Afghanistan and a few dozen that have or had participated in Iraq doesn’t sound too much like we’ve “spurned traditional alliances”), but faults Europe as well for already being “disinclined for their own reasons to sympathise with any American tragedy”.

Frankly, Democrats are blaming Bush for losing something we never really had.

Technorati Tags: Anne Applebaum, goodwill, anti-Americanism