The Times predictably ran an op-ed on North Korea today that essentially ignored the question of which policies led to North Korea getting a nuke (with U.S. help). Instead, the op-ed all but defends the 1994 accords and sees them as the basis for new diplomacy. I guess this is a fair position – the notion that people who have supported a failed policy should actually explain their failure seems, in the world of Raines propaganda, hopelessly utopian. But look who they got to write the op-ed: the guy who was, in Jake Tapper’s words, “a State Department official responsible for implementing a 1994 agreement with North Korea that was to have ended the country’s processing of plutonium at a factory suspected to be manufacturing nuclear weapons.” Joel S. Wit. Here’s his CSIS bio:
He was most recently the coordinator for the 1994 U.S.-North Korea Agreed Framework and was responsible for U.S. policy related to the implementation of that agreement. From 1993 to 1995, Mr. Wit served as senior adviser to Robert L. Gallucci, ambassador-at-large in charge of policy towards North Korea, where he worked on U.S. strategy to resolve the 1994 nuclear crisis, was in charge of the interagency sanctions working group, and led the U.S. effort to establish a new international organization, KEDO, to implement the Agreed Framework.
Again, that’s fair enough. But shouldn’t the Times have at least identified the man as such? Isn’t it relevant that the guy now defending the failed 1994 accords on the New York Times op-ed page was actually the person in the Clinton team responsible for enforcing them? Raines law says otherwise. Keep the readers in the dark, and keep spinning, spinning, spinning.
THE WESTERN DISEASE: This astonishing moment of clarity in the Independent, no less. Maybe Bali has changed minds in the world, after all:
Ditto those who blew apart the however many hundreds of kids dancing the last of their lives away in Bali. It behoves us to stay out of their motives. Utterly obscene, the narrative of guilty causation which now waits on every fresh atrocity – “What else are the dissatisfied to do but kill?” etc – as though dissatisfaction were an automatic detonator, as though Cain were the creation of Abel’s will. Obscene in its haste. Obscene in its self-righteousness, mentally permitting others to pay the price of our self-loathing. Obscene in its ignorance – for we should know now how Selbsthass operates, encouraging those who hate us only to hate us more, since we concur in their conviction of our detestableness.
Here is our decadence: not the nightclubs, not the beaches and the sex and the drugs, but our incapacity to believe we have been wronged. Our lack of self-worth.
SORRY, DOLLY: Whitney Houston’s hit, “I Will Always Love You,” was written by Dolly Parton. If anyone gets the royalties, it should be Parton.
The Dish 