Friday, January 05, 2018

'Toontime: Big Buttons

credit: John Darkow
Wackydoodle sez: Y'all should see his ego!

It is simply astounding that the president of the largest nuclear power on Earth should engage in what the vernacular terms a "pissing contest" with the absolute leader of a tiny, backward nation still struggling to overcome the mass destruction of the Korean War. The U.S. dropped a total of 635,000 tons of bombs, including 32,557 tons of napalm, on Korea, more than during the whole Pacific campaign of World War II. According to USAF damage assessments, "eighteen of twenty-two major cities in North Korea had been at least half obliterated."* Yet the Donald's insecurity about North Korea is only exceeded by his fragile ego. To attempt to justify his outrageous performance in office as "standing up for his fellow Americans" is simply risible nonsense. The fact is he is endangering the country with his infantile taunting of a Stalinesque dictator now armed with working nuclear ICBMs; as Joe Biden said in classic Washington understatement, the guy is not presidential. A 100 kiloton hydrogen bomb (the estimated size of North Korea's largest test to date) is capable of wiping out the central business district of a city the size of Sydney. 

If Trump wants to prove what a man he is, he ought to show up in Panmunjon and challenge Kim to do the same.  After all Ronald went to Reykjavik and shocked the world--in a good way!

credit: Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune
BC Idonwanna sez, Cold shrink size! 
*The US Air Force horrific bombing campaign in the Korean War, under the aegis of the United Nations Command, constituted genocide, says commentator Joseph Essertier at Counterpunch. Neither the United Nation’s Genocide Convention approved in 1948 and going into effect in 1951, nor the Red Cross Convention on the Protection of Civilians in Wartime of 1948 had the “slightest impact on this air war” concludes American historian Bruce Cumings, who has covered the history thoroughly, including the abundant lies in North Korean government propaganda.  There is a way out of this fifty-plus year mess, and our colleague, President Putin has provided it.  Possibly because of that, it has been largely ignored by the jingoist domestic press.  The Moon-Putin Plan unveiled in September in Vladivostok outlines nine “bridges” of cooperation linking South Korea to Russia via North Korea—“gas, railroads, ports, electricity, a northern sea route, shipbuilding, jobs, agriculture, and fisheries", says Moon. Siberian oil and gas pipelines would be extended to Korea, both North and South, as well as to Japan. Both Koreas would be linked up with the vast rail networks of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, including high-speed rail, and the Eurasian Economic Union, which includes the Trans-Siberian Railway. Once the North is integrated into the modern world economy via Russia, the two Koreans can begin discussing in earnest the logical conclusion--peaceful reunification and disarmament that would see the American imperial occupation of the South terminated.  The money saved can be used for pressing social welfare needs at home, and our national security actually improved, not threatened.  The only interests disadvantaged thereby would be those capitalists who supply the materiel and weapons for continuing the deadly stalemate.