IN THE NEWS
When you have a minute, I'd be grateful if you looked at this clip from a July press conference, where Bush is asked a pointed question about North Korea.
Go on, I can wait.
Dum-de-dum...
Now that you're back, I wonder if you had the same reaction I did.
The first reaction I'm sure many of us had was, "Wow, what a dick." The ad hominem attack on the reporter ("What do you, Ms. Smarty-Pants Reporter, know about North Korea's weapons program that I don't?") displayed more than even the usual sensitivity to criticism, however.
Perhaps Bush is just prickly when Orth-Nay Orea-Kay is mentioned. After all, the Admnistration has alternately tried to ignore the DPRK, intimidate it when it couldn't be ignored, or quietly assent to its demands for food aid or a particular negotiation framework. The Administration's priorities have been elsewhere, so North Korea was always an inconvenient distraction. Bush's "dick-itude" to a reporter in July may just have been the usual impatience with anything related to North Korea.
Or, perhaps, at the time the reporter asked the question, Bush actually did know more than the reporter did. Maybe American and foreign intelligence agencies were providing evidence that the North Korean government was progressing towards a nuclear test, undeterred by anything the United States had said or done. In this very hypothetical scenario, his "dick-esque" handling in July of the North Korean question had a more immediate inspiration: the knowledge that the US overnment would soon appear powerless to stop North Korea from testing ballistic missiles or nuclear warheads.
That's just speculation, but we'll certainly hear a lot of questions in the next few weeks about how much of a surprise the North Korean nuclear test really was.
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