North Korean Heir Apparent Makes Grand Debut at Massive Military Parade

Kim Jong Un appears live on Nork TV for 1st Time 

before thousands of goose-stepping soldiers

At a massive ceremony in Pyongyang, North Korea yesterday, Kim Jong Un -favored son of Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-Il- reviewed a massive military parade alongside his father in a ceremony dedicated to celebrating the 65th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers Party of Korea. 

The younger Kim's appearance in front of 20,000 troops, heavy weaponry, and huge crowds came two days after a senior official appeared to confirm that he would be the secretive state's next leader:  "Our people are honoured to serve the great president Kim Il-sung and the great leader Kim Jong-il. Now we also have the honour of serving the young general Kim Jong-un." he was quoted as saying on Friday.

The Telegraph:

The presence of senior Chinese officials and rarely-invited foreign media at the weekend-long celebrations further confirmed that Kim Jong-un was being anointed in public. 

Until a few months ago, Kim, the third and youngest son of Kim Jong-il, was all but unknown, both to the outside world and inside his secretive homeland. But with his ailing father, who is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 and who now walks with a pronounced limp, desperate to ensure that a third generation of the Kim family succeeds him, the Swiss-educated Kim Jong-un, has risen rapidly in North Korea's hierarchy. 

Last month, he was appointed as a 4-star general and as vice-chairman of the Workers Party's central military commission. Despite Kim Jong-un's lack of experience in government, his succession seems to have been approved by China, North Korea's only true ally, which fears instability in the DPRK will lead to a flood of refugees across its borders.

Those poor bastards better hope this kid did something other than ski and chase blondes in Switzerland, because the mess he's about to inherit is a decrepit economic basket-case ten times worse than East Germany ever was. 

And despite the rhetoric, the South Koreans want little or nothing to do with fixing this penniless Stalinist hell- they couldn't afford to absorb it even if they wanted to. East Germany bled the West white, and it's still just limping-along. And South Korea is no Germany, either... hard to see how reunification will ever work there, really-

The Telegraph   Pookie's Toons  ITN News  Wikipedia

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Alinsky Left in Full-Court Press

With Barack Obama's poll numbers starting to look just a wee-bit shakey, and embarrassing TEA Party II protests about to put to bed the nonsensical Everyone-Just-Loves-Barack myth, it's not by chance that now we see fresh attempts at baiting fake conflicts on the right... in-order to divert attention from the president's habitual dishonesty, hubris, disregard for the law/constitution/ethics, and general all-round incompetence, while keeping the GOP back-on-their-heels for 2010 and beyond.

And the most obvious conclusion that can be drawn from their words and actions is that the Democratic Party is terrified of Sarah Palin- pure and simple.

Nobody in the GOP could care less what Colin Powell says... nor Meghan McCain, anonymous sources/"leaks" in Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair, blather from MSNBC's Obot-drones, repulsive "humor" from David Letterman, et al. But the left is attempting to create the appearance of ceaseless chaos and disunity within the Republican party- there's little doubt about that.

Various naive or disingenuous RINOs and other mysterious "sources" -with their puerile he said/she said statements- aren't news, and not relevant in any way. Obama and the MSM/left are simply exploiting them to create their own politically-useful stories and manufactured GOP "scandals".

The left have been employing despicable Alinsky-inspired divide-and-conquer and character assassination techniques since before The One was even sworn-in… promoting synthetic “fights” like Limbaugh vs. Steele, in-addition to ceaseless ridicule of Jindal, Palin, and others- even shameful distortion of the legacy of Ronald Reagan. The strategy's larger purpose is to eliminate GOP rallying points and philosophical framework for 2010/12... while making the Republicans look like they're mired in petty, peripheral issues.

Now we again have yet another crude attack on Sarah Palin, factually inaccurate and mostly unsubstantiated by Vanity Fair so as to stir-the-pot, so then the press can descend upon various Republicans to try and quote them in contradiction to one another... same underhanded game for months now.

Typical in support of this effort is calculating articles like here on Politico- telling us all how "high profile" Republicans are allegedly fighting like cats-n-dogs regarding the recent Vanity Fair article on Sarah Palin. But Steve Schmidt is far from relevant- as a matter of fact after bungling the McCain campaign, his career has got to be over. But for some reason, the left hangs on his every word... how about that. Rather, I'd take Kristol's version of events- if you have any interest in the truth here.

As for Meghan McCain's latest sage advice that Republicans forgive disgraced, irresponsible, and selfish Governor Mark Sanford... well, it's just about time that her daddy finally told her to shut up. I've never met one person in my life who gives two hoots what this girl has to say- why should they?

The fact is that this poor thing is so hungry for her 15 mins of fame... but sadly is too dumb to see she's only being put on TV as a tool of the Alinskyite left, and with no greater moral or intellectual authority than, say, a Levi Johnston. But now that she's had a taste, she can't handle going back to hang-out at the mall in obscurity... and man, are they making a fool out of her. You'd think her parents would have educated her on how the world works- perhaps she wouldn't have turned out to be such a useful idiot for the DNC.

The Democrats know perfectly well Obama's poll numbers are going to be in the toilet by 2012, so they've opted for pre-emptive attacks and character assasination on all fronts- and as far as they're concerned, the best defense is a good offense, coupled to Alinsky-style diversions. As indicated by their substantial efforts in her direction, Governor Palin has clearly emerged in their minds as the gravest threat to an Obama 2nd term.

And what a coincidence it is then, that all this specious "advice" for the GOP coming from Team Obama, Pelosi, Reid, assorted B-league RINOs, and the press just happens to involve the party abandoning the principles that bring it votes and/or conflict with the Obama agenda. All this in order to morph into some sort of Obama-lite, and a silent partner in Obama's stealthy, yet radical makeover of this country. Hey liberals, if we wanted your "advice"- don't you think we'd ask for it?

It’s also not difficult to see why Democrats might prefer to banter playfully about made-up GOP “scandals” and irrelevancies like Meghan’s latest drivel than debate Obama’s ongoing destruction of the country-

Back in (MSM-ignored) reality, Obama is being largely humiliated overseas, and this week Al Jazeera harshly criticized Obama's tepid and useless "support" for the protesters in Iran- who even this pan-Arabic news network said were largely pro-American. Oh well, they won't be anymore by the time Obama's done allying himself with their slave-masters- and since they're mostly the young and educated of Iran, they will be hating us for the next 50 years now. Note that Chairman O sure didn't waste any time in voicing support for a corrupt Honduran leftist, though.

North Korea's already telling us they're going to fire missiles right at us- could you imagine that crackpot trying this on Reagan's watch? He'd have made it abundantly clear that if they struck us, Pyongyang would be turned into a glass-floored, self-lighting parking lot. What does Obama do? Issue some wishy-washy statement of "concern"- then cowers under his desk.

And as reported by Sammy at Yid-with-Lid, this week, even the far-left, uber-Obama fans at Der Spiegel ripped him a new one for his ill-advised and treacherous print-money spending. Meanwhile, the socialist bastions of Germany and Hungary this week both enacted tax cuts to stimulate their economies... a stark contrast to the United States' precarious path.

What is becoming apparent is that when the Democrats' reckless pork-n-welfare spending spree fails to create any real economic gains -but stokes vicious inflation and crashes the dollar instead- the Democrats will face significant setbacks in November 2010- which is now only 16 mos away.

The moment is fast approaching when the propaganda and immoral attacks on Palin, Jindal, and others are as exposed and despised as the Democrats' serial mismanagement of America is destined to be. There is then to be a heavy electoral price for the Democrats... while history is likely to be an even harsher judge. This could play-out as the largest wasted political opportunity of all time, with the Democratic Party not wholly-entrusted with the purse strings ever again, once we all digest the price for the catastrophic folly of Obamamania.

The employment of such bad-faith media disinformation tactics -coupled to the plastic, disingenuous front that Obama presents- is absolutely un-American. Sadly, this fits-right-in with the rest of his statist, anti-freedom agenda. Many in this country are belatedly coming to realize these things... and they don't like it.

Yet another reason to put the grownups back in charge next fall-

Yes-We-Can (Get Laughed-At by an Eccentric Tin Pot Dictator)

Doesn't look like many countries take Obama and Hillary very seriously, does it?  And the reason it appears that way is because they don't. Time to break-out another goofy "restart" button, perhaps? 

(good luck spelling it right in Korean this time).

Dear Leader Comrade Generalissimo Kim Jong Il 

(I hear he's  one-hell-of-a-golfer ) somehow doesn't seem to have fallen under the charms of Obama's hollow schmoozing one bit.   Rather, sensing weakness, the communist North Korean regime responded to the conciliatory gestures with nothing but contempt and aggression.  The flurry of nuclear testing and missile launches timed for our Memorial Day weekend was yet the latest "diplomatic statement" from the pugnacious, Stalinist 

Hermit Kingdom.

Of course, it never really made a lot of sense to try and deal in good faith and "reach out" to a dark, evil, and Machiavellian regime that would "hate" Mickey Mouse if he was US president- and for a refresher, has shot-down civilian airliners, operates a cruel police-state with a chain of torture/concentration camps... and even had plans to assassinate Reagan on his visit to Korea's DMZ in 1983.  

So it's hard to imagine that a grown-man like Obama truly believed that Pyongyang was reasonable, trustable... and cuddle-able.  The difference with this president is that they will not only hate him, but will despise and disrespect him deeply for his cowardice, naivete, and lack of resolution.  Of course,  a man with all the diplomatic experience and strategic/moral clarity that Obama and Hillary lack -like say, a John Bolton- could have told you this is exactly how it would play out with Obama's appeasement-based posture... as he did. 

Sadly, all Team Obama are really considering is the same kind of "deal" that serial-failure Jimmy Carter talked Bill Clinton into ten years ago: bribing Pyongyang with fuels and food to stop their development of nuclear weapons and ICBMs, while they graciously accept our gifts and continue to do just as they please at secret, underground sites... and serruptitiously selling nuclear know-how to our other enemies like Syria and Iran.

Pyongyang is currently developing -and has now tested- it's longest range ICBM, one specifically designed to carry a nuclear warhead. The Taepodong-2 missile has a 6000 km range, bringing Alaska and even possibly the west coast of the US within range... and right as the misguided Obama seeks the cancellation of many of America's defense programs.

Although many still in the ether don't realize it yet, Obama is in a tailspin on the economy, ethics, and foreign policy.  Nobody that has any sense of how the world works respects (nor fears) him... and that includes Wall St., the military, the Kremlin, Tehran, Caracas, or Pyongyang.  

Somehow all the talk of how Kim is this crackpot eccentric while Obama is portrayed as all-knowing and wise doesn't quite square with reality when the "crackpot" is running circles around our flawless messiah.  This is the same oblivious President Obama that was apparently busy with his puppy-vetting process or playing basketball while the Russians where nabbing our Afghan supply air-base in Kyrgizstan 

In addition to his ethical and fiscal follies, Barack Obama is endangering our national security, a failure of his most primary duty as president... maybe we should draw a line here? 

The luxury of living in a celebrity-driven/liberal/MSM fantasy world is not a right that Obama supporters can cling-to indefinitely, as it's both the voters and the press' duty to make informed, responsible, good-faith decisions... not waste power making a self-indulgent PC fashion statement instead.  And it's getting to the point where this kind of willfully-ignorant "thinking" is not just irresponsible, but dangerous.  Obamania's sheeple are deeply delusional, and in desperate need of deprogramming... as the misguided Obama's enablers, these fools are going to get us killed.

Ruthless, insatiable foes clearly have no reason to take seriously a smiley plastic mannequin like Obama, they know he's not going to do anything.  He was hoping to half-surrender to everyone on his recent international glad-handing tours and have Gates handle Iraq and Afghanistan- in order to buy us some peace and tranquility for him to focus on his real pet project, a radical, far-left domestic agenda... but events tend to have a way of intervening-

I would say that we should now expect for Tehran to deal Obama even greater defeats... except for the fact that tiny Israel will likely be saving us from our folly.   Obama, like Jimmy Carter, is making the US into an impotent, irrelevant bystander as events take their course, and nations like Russia and China fill the leadership vacuum.  Allies such as Israel will be plotting a more independent course in the interest of self-preservation... and will -like our enemies- simply ignore Obama.

The White House is likely working diligently on how to offer-up a speech or statement full of empty platitudes and ludicrous apologies (as in Prague)... do nothing about Pyongyang's defiance... and then blame it all on someone else.  But the problem with this standard Obama default strategy is that Democrats Bill Clinton and ex-President Carter are the ones who created this mess ten years ago... and our new president has adopted the identical, failed policy lock-stock-and-barrel.  

If you're American or one of our allies, and not scared with Barack Obama as US Commander-in-Chief yet...  you sure ought to be.  

Socialism Returns to Prague

Twenty years after the Velvet Revolution, the former Warsaw-Pact Czechs are enjoying the fruits of a dynamic free-market democracy in a country that was crumbling in grey socialist mediocrity just a short time ago.  Today, new Mercedes and Alfa-Romeos fill streets that were previously only sparsely populated with smoking Eastern-block clunkers and the occasional frumpy black commie limo with some aparatchik in the back.   The largely pro-American Czechs (who feature Europe's one and only American country music station and a semi-pro baseball league) supplied troops in Iraq and last year signed-onto George Bush's missile defense proposal based here and in Poland. 

Czech President Vaclav Klaus is a pugnacious conservative known for his skeptimism regarding the EU- a Thatcherite capitalist who famously confronted Al Gore at Davos with "I don't think there's any global warming".  Klaus is credited for much of the speedy transition to capitalism as PM in the early-mid 1990's, albeit with some bumps... and has taken an unfashionable pro-market stance in his ideas for dealing with the world financial crisis.

Current Czech PM Mirek Topolanek is the one who stated in the EU Parliment that profligate spending favored by Obama-Pelosi-Reid represents a "road to hell" that EU governments must avoid.  He added "We need to read the history books and the lessons of history and the biggest success of the (EU) is the refusal to go this way."  

So Prague Castle doesn't seem to be the most obvious venue for President Obama's first public speech in Europe- but the Czechs currently hold the rotating EU presidency, and of course many people here, as elsewhere, are enthusiastic about the Obama presidency for whatever reasons... so here he is. And there is a varied political spectrum, with powerful social-democrats, Greens, and others- and even an only mildly reformed Communist Party who pragmatically replaced the traditional hammer-and-sickle/star symbol with a less-threatening-looking three red cherries on a stem.  

My wife happens to be Czech, and we have a place in Prague- so this morning I attended Obama's speech at the castle that overlooks this Golden City.  And the script seemed like it was written in anticipation of North Korea's Taepodong II missle test just 7 hours earlier.

The socialism that has come back to Prague 20 years after the revolution -and 40 years after the Russian invasion- now comes in the grinning form of Barack Obama- a man governing far to the left of the bipartisan-centrist rhetoric he employed during last fall's US election campaign.  

One result is a surreal situation in which America has big-spending statist allies like France and Germany considering its "stimulus" proposals too fiscally reckless for their liking.  And countries like Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, who suffered through 40 years of totalitarian socialism's systemic cruelty and comprehensive lack of results, do not share the romantic view some in the West have of Obama's ultra-liberal proposals and big-government solutions for every challenge.

With TelePrompTer screens glistening in the morning haze, Obama appeared about 20 minutes late with his wife Michelle to moderate cheers from the mostly young crowd.  Like Obama's most-fervent US supporters, those attending appeared to be 20-somethings alongside 60-something boomers-  and many of these came in from Germany, where all things Obama are quite trendy.

The President appeared with a large forced grin, as a car salesman would do to manipulate your emotions- providing the same "what's this guy up to?" feeling I got from the first time I ever heard him speak.  And like a slick salesman, Obama is unflinching as he tells you the car can fly, or go under-water... whatever you need to hear.

He proceeded to deliver a speech on green energy and foreign policy that attempted to tie-together Czech and US history and agendas with a dash of Yes-We-Can.  Obama's popularity is clearly helped by his mixed-race heritage, yet he still finds it useful to make statements like "In my birth-year of 1961, few could imagine a person like me" coming here as US President.  That lead inexplicably to "I am here today because people on both sides of the wall (Iron Curtain?) refused to be kept separated, "no matter what they looked like".  How did the communist Europeans look different from Western Europeans?  Hard to imagine just what he's talking about.

Obama used the occasion to outline his pollyanna plans for a "world without nuclear weapons"- including a comprehensive test-ban treaty, anti-proliferation regimes, a world "fuel bank" for supplying cooperative powers with fuel for peaceful uses, as well as a "strategic reduction with the Russians this year".

Obama put some effort towards presenting a case that forced-Soviet-allies of the Warsaw Pact like Prague "came together" with the West because they "wouldn't listen" to those who said it wasn't possible or likely- sounds good.  But the plain truth is that no Velvet Revolution would ever have been possible without a serious rollback of Soviet power- as accomplished by Ronald Reagan... and he didn't do it by talking.  

One only has to look to the Soviets' crushing of the Budapest (1956) and Prague Spring (1968) uprisings to see just how they dealt with renegades. President Reagan never considered "reaching out" to the Russians until they had been forced to bring in the reformer Gorbachev, and the US had regained military superiority- well into his second term as president.  Even then, he was reluctant to make any deal that would save the Soviet system economically... he wanted it to be defeated, and for millions to be freed.

It was Reagan who aggressively challenged Gorabachev with "tear down this wall" in Berlin- and was mocked by the American and European left as naive and too confrontational.   While previous presidents promoted containment or detente with the USSR, producing a smoldering, dangerous, and expensive 40-year Cold War, Reagan argued for a "real arms race" with the Soviet Union.  He said "in an all-out competition, they can't keep up" and would become economically "unhinged".  Pacifists -such as then-Senator Joe Biden- opposed Reagan's Pershing II missile deployments in Europe, SDI missile-defense inititiative, as-well as almost every other weapons program he used to confront the Soviet Union. 

When Reagan initiated this politically unpopular military buildup in 1981, called the "Evil Empire" by it's name, then later struck a deal with the Saudis to drive the price of oil to $20/bbl, the Soviet empire cracked, then crumbled... completely vindicating the principled and politically brave strategy.  The fact is that the Czechs, Poles, East Germans, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romanians, and Slovaks didn't stand a chance of throwing-of their chains until Reagan put the Kremlin back on it's heels for good.  And it was that moral and strategic clarity that won the Cold War without firing a shot... not offers of appeasement. And clearly not the two sides joining-hands, as in Obama's version of reality.

Sounding today much like strategic train-wreck Jimmy Carter, Obama  pronounced that "Moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon"-  just the kind "moral" superiority that allowed Carter to lose countries such as Nicaragua and Iran to far worse regimes than the unsavory US ally that he withdrew support for.  In stark contrast, Reagan had told us that "We can't play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent." 

President Obama stated that in overthrowing communism, the Czechs "exposed the emptiness of an ideology"- but it would be interesting to hear him explain just what he considers the key differences to be between past socialism and the multi-trillion-dollar big-government/social programs that has unveiled since he got himself elected.

He then stressed that regarding Iran and North Korea, we should not "let anybody tell you we can't work together- because Yes  We Can"- but there's really nobody saying that except perhaps some imaginary straw-man in the speechwriter's mind.  We have worked very well with a number of allies in the Six-Party talks with Pyongyang, as well as the US-EU diplomatic efforts regarding Tehran's nuclear ambitions.  We've also been offering for years, alongside these allies, exactly the same incentives, dialog, and sanctions/threats of sanctions that Obama proposes... and without a trace of success.  There is likely little new that the West can offer at this point that would entice them into giving up a their nuclear programs- if they're not about to be bombed, then keep going- why not? 

The sad truth is that both have sensed weakness in Obama's "open hand" gestures- which they have met only with contempt.  These regimes' political survival is completely based on outside enemies, a confrontational stance, and propaganda victories- and their power can't survive a comprehensive peace deal, so they see little to gain from it.   Obama says they can "join" the rest of us- but can either really expect to compete effectively in the world economy? He seems to operate under the assumption that they don't want to be rogue states- while in reality, they thrive on it.  They've already survived all the sanctions thrown at them, and are likely correct that their strongest hand lies in pursuing nuclear weaponry and ICBM systems.  If either had wanted a good faith deal, they'd have done it a long time ago-  instead, they've broken every agreement or promise ever made.

What in-fact might work would be a credible military threat, so these apocalyptic cults would realize the consequences of such nuclear brinkmanship, while leaving them a final "out"-  but that's far from what Barack Obama was proposing today.  This speech had standard formula in-full: smiling, hope-n-change "we're-all-in-this-together" themes, false arguments regarding "they",  conveniently malleable history lessons, and the proposal of failed ideas of the past as "new" and morally-superior.  

He also stated that it was "cowardly" to embrace fear, rather than "hope"- apparently this doesn't apply to his domestic strong-arm tactics with legislators of his own party.   How much longer will this schtick work before reality intervenes, anyway?