Impossible things before breakfast ...

Rich Lowry dissects the latest Democrat to claim that all was well with North Korea until Bush came along. In this case it's Kerry...

...The U.S. came to believe in 1997, for instance, that North Korea had built an underground nuclear facility in Kumchang-ri. The administration still dishonestly maintained that all was well with the Agreed Framework. On July 8, 1998, Albright told Congress, the Agreed Framework had "frozen North Korea's dangerous nuclear-weapons program." When intelligence about the suspect site at Kumchang-ri became public in August 1998, Albright told frustrated senators at a hearing that she hadn't known about the information until later in July. The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, present at the hearing, had to interrupt her: "Madame Secretary, that is incorrect." She had been told many months earlier.

It was clear by the late 1990s to honest observers that North Korea still had a nuclear-weapons program, while it was spreading missile technology far and wide and battening itself on U.S. support in keeping with the Agreed Framework. In response to congressional outrage, the administration tapped former defense secretary William Perry in late 1998 to review its North Korean policy. He said in March 1999, "What they're doing is moving forward on their nuclear weapons."...

It's stupifying that Leftists can tell bare-faced Josh-Marshall-type lies, and then preen themselves in their oily smugness on the dishonesty of the Bush Administration! Unbelievable.

It's also an indication of the utter bankruptcy of Dem foreign policy, that they can say with a straight face that the answer to a failure of this magnitude is to do more of the same! They will never say that the time has come to defend ourselves, to defend freedom and the world's peace, no matter the cost. I've met these people--people who believe that "we have to keep talking," no matter what the result. The thought that anything in Western Civilization, especially anything American, is worth fighting for, is not even on their mental map.

Stephen den Beste wrote some very interesting things recently on how we are pressuring China to deal with North Korea. What was conspicuous was that the main obstacle facing the Bush Administration is convincing the Chinese that a US Administration won't collapse when negotiations fail to achieve what we want. They start with the assumption that the US will give in and bribe NK to pretend to cooperate. They start with the assumption that the US wants to be hoodwinked, so that we can avid dealing with problems.

That's the terrible price we are paying for decades of appeasement and dishonesty. It's going to take years of unyielding firmness and honesty before countries like China start to assume that we will do what we say we will do.

...If you don't want to know, you're just papering over the truth in order to pretend that an agreement is working.

This is exactly what Clinton administration did. Its food aid to North Korea, for instance, served an important ulterior purpose: creating the illusion of progress with the North. "Officially a humanitarian gesture, American food aid has become a bribe for North Korea to attend meetings that create the impression U.S. diplomacy is working," wrote former diplomat Robert A. Manning in 1998....