Tags
Allison Camerota, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Gordon Chang, Guam, Harry Truman, John McCain, Kim Jong Un, North Korea
We have, in Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s Communist dictator, a true lunatic. He has, particularly during the Age of Obama, relentlessly provoked America and the international community, and has gotten away with it. Now we have a President that is not afraid to use force, and appears, unlike his predecessors, unwilling to kick the North Korea can down the road. The recent revelation that North Korea has miniaturized nuclear weapons capable of being mated with intercontinental ballistic missiles must be tempered with the realization we knew that in 2013, and Barack Obama did his best, with the willing support of a lapdog media, to hide that information. Mr. Trump recently warned North Korea against continuing threats and promised “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
As one would expect, the danger posed by a madman in North Korea is as nothing, to America’s self-imagined elites, compared with Donald Trump. Even American congress critters, including—surprise!—John McCain, have attacked Mr. Trump for daring to say things very much like Harry Truman and even Bill “I did not have sex with that woman” Clinton.
A good example of the media’s insanity is explained by the good folks at Legal Insurrection:
North Korea has threatened to fire missiles at Guam, a US territory home to thousands of US citizens and a major US Air Force base.
What if the missiles fell short or missed the island?
What’s the big deal? It’s ‘just a missile test.
That was the thrust of CNN host Alisyn Camerota statement this morning:
‘If these missiles, if they do this, and if these go into the waters off Guam, they don’t hit Guam, then isn’t this just another sort of provocation and a missile test? Does it have to be responded to with force?
Oh sure. Just a test. One wonders how Ms. Camerota would feel if the Norks were shooting missiles at her home. How many would have to miss, and by how much, before she might consider the ordinance to be something more than a harmless test?
Camerota’s guest Gordon Chang had a suggestion that would surely, if implemented, cause the Norks to quake in their little communist boots:
ALISYN CAMEROTA: Are they just baiting the president? I mean in other words, if these missiles, if they do this, and if these go into the waters off Guam, they don’t hit Guam, then isn’t this just another sort of provocation and a missile test? Does it have to be responded to with force?
GORDON CHANG: No, it certainly doesn’t have to be responded with force. And I think there’s some non-kinetic options that we have that could really put the North Koreans and the Chinese on the back foot.
CAMEROTA: Meaning what?
CHANG: I think the one thing we should be doing is enforcing US law against money laundering.
All sanctions against North Korea have every done is cause the Norks to demand negotiations. The result of all such negotiations to date has been food, fuel and cash for the North Koreans, and nothing for the civilized world.
Mr. Trump’s comments well demonstrate the chasm between normal Americans and the self-imagined elite, who think Mr. Trump’s mere existence to be a world-shattering disaster. When Mr. Trump says things like this, normal tend to think “about time.” But they worry. Mr. Trump, like Barack Obama, has drawn a red line. His comments aren’t an issue. Failing to back them up when the time comes is.
And as for the elites? They’ll have the vapors over whatever Mr. Trump says or does. Remember their righteous indignation over a Diet Coke and two scoops of ice cream? Fortunately, I suspect Mr. Trump understands this well, and just doesn’t care. He does appear to know who our enemies and allies are, and is apparently willing to treat our enemies like enemies. How can I tell? Consider this from Fox News:
President Trump on Thursday [08-10-17] doubled down on his ‘fire and fury’ warning to North Korea, saying the country should be ‘very, very nervous’ about even thinking of attacking the United States or its allies.
Pushing back against critics who suggested his comments earlier in the week were too forceful, Trump told reporters: ‘Maybe it wasn’t tough enough.’
‘They’ve been doing this to our country for a long time, for many years,’ the president said of North Korea. ‘It’s about time that somebody stuck up for the people of this country and for the people of other countries. So if anything, that statement wasn’t tough enough. [skip]
‘Asked by a reporter what’s tougher than threatening ‘fire and fury,’ Trump said: ‘You’ll see. You’ll see.’
‘If North Korea does anything in terms of even thinking about attacking anybody that we love or we represent or our allies or us, they can be very, very nervous,’ he said.
Trump wouldn’t say if he’s considering a preemptive strike on North Korea. ‘We don’t talk about that,’ he said. ‘I never do.’
‘What they’ve been doing, what they’ve been getting away with, is a tragedy and it can’t be allowed,’ he said.
Poor Ms. Camerota and Mr. Chang. I hope they’ve been taking their blood pressure medication.
Stately McDaniel Manor 
I think the President’s response, and the military action that could follow if necessary, just might give the state level bad actors of the world pause. It worked for the Romans, it will work for us… Mess with us and we will kill every last one of you.
The 3rd squadron of anti missile batteries in Alaska was canceled by Obama shortly after taking office. The silos are there but the equipment was not tested from my friends who were working there. Logic says they were there to defend against NoKo and that was before they developed their ICBM missile system. So if NoKo’s cry of wolf actually becomes a missile attack, we have limited our defenses. I have never heard an explanation why the squadron was not needed. And yes we have enough missiles to destroy NoKo, but would we use them? Remember the NoKo attacked South Korea in 1950, as we had wound down our occupation after WWII, and that was against a strong President in Truman and the US being a world power which still didn’t use nuclear weapons even when China invaded in support of a defeated NoKo. We lost over 34,000 KIA in that forgotten UN war.
The previous family leaders shot down a US reconnaissance aircraft over international waters, captured the USS Pueblo spy ship just outside of NoKo waters and sunk a SoKo frigate and attempted to assassinate the President of SoKo. Little was done after these provocations and NoKo recognizes a US/SoKo pattern of appeasement and why shouldn’t they.
The question is will they believe Trump will act.
In point of fact China did not enter the war until UN forces crossed the 38th Parallel. Given that China had repeatedly warned the UN they were going to take this action, MacArthur was unbelievably surprised.
China intervened because they thought they would be the next target. This was understandable given America’s support of the Nationalist Chinese regime in Taiwan, to the point of recognizing that them as the sole legitimate government of China.
The devil is in the details. All of your chest-thumping doesn’t alter the fact that the Norks have several thousand artillery tubes aimed at Seoul, and even if we take them out as fast as humanly possible, tens of thousands (if not more) will die.
China is not happy with Kim, but prizes stability over chaos, a long-enduring tradition in that country. On the other hand the consider North Korea to be within their sphere of interest. The south likes the idea of reunification, but the self-evident costs of German re-unification gives them pause.
Right now I’m giving Trump a lot of leeway, and rope, to deal with this. Let’s see what he does with this opportunity.
No chest thumping intended. If you can’t get people to love you, then you can get them to fear you. The USA’s problem for most of my life is we have only focused on the love part.
If the Norks don’t believe us now, whoever is left alive afterwards will as well as the rest of the world.
Pres. Truman did not want us to get into a protracted war with China. We had just finished WWII. After China attacked, if Pres. Truman had taken General LeMay’s advice and fire bombed a few Chinese cities, the Chinese would have pulled out. As LeMay pointed out afterwards, the death toll would have been far lower.
On a personal note, my uncle survived being a bombardier in the 8th Air Force in WWII, but Korea almost killed him.
I’m glad he made it thru. The B-29s were definitely at risk from jet interceptors.
I’m not sure firebombing a few cities would have much effect aside from pissing them off. First, are you going to accomplish much besides killing civilians? Japanese cities were paper & wood due to frequent earthquakes. Not sure Chinese cities followed that pattern. That’s not to mention the question as to whether B-29s could even bomb Chinese cities and make it back. By that time they had MiG-17s and MiG-19s. Not the same conditions as in late WW2.
Besides which by that point the Chinese Communist leaders had spent the past several decades fighting & dying. Mao certainly killed off a huge number of his own people during the Cultural Revolution. Point being that the Chinese had become acculturated to massive deaths. They didn’t like it, but they learned to live with events.
I would be willing to contribute to buy Ms. Camerota a ticket to Agana, Guam. She should be happy to go, since there is no danger. It is a lovely place. I’ve been there.
Dear Dave:
Well, no danger unless we put too many people on the island and it flips over and capsizes, as Rep. Hank Johnson once worried.
H, wait, Trump has played his ace:
http://www.duffelblog.com/2017/08/pentagon-deploys-mattis-korean-dmz-massive-show-force/