Hillary Clinton vs. North Korea

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I think it's a sign you're doing something right when the totalitarians in Pyongyang, always so busy brutalizing their own people and wallowing in their own pathetic self-aggrandizement, take the time to attack you personally.

And, clearly, Hillary Clinton is doing something right.

In response to Mrs. Clinton's suggestion that North Korea's leadership is like "small children and unruly teenagers and people who are demanding attention," a government spokesman called her (and one wonders what was lost in the translation of such inanity) a "funny lady" and "by no means intelligent": "Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping."

Actually, no, she looks like what she is, a strong, principled woman who is taking on, if still rather tamely, North Korea's thugocracy -- and you have to be seriously lacking in the intelligence department to call her unintelligent. There are many worse things, and more accurate things, that can be said about North Korea's leadership, but it isn't exactly off the mark to compare it to petulant children, although that rather insults children, the bloodthirsty bullies among them excepted.

No, I'm not advocating war with North Korea, but we'll all be better off, not least the people of that backwards land, when Kim Jong-il's brutal regime, including whatever post-Kim variations follow it, is wiped off the face of the earth.