Korea: It’s Really This Bad

I try to keep this blog at a higher level than I would if I reacted to some of the stories we have seen from South Korea over the last few days, but today may mark one of those days when South Korean society has shown us such a historical example of itself at its worst that it cannot, umm, pass without my comment. I have lived for somewhere between thirty and forty years, and for most of them, I have loved to read. Above all, I have loved reading newspapers. I have read thousands of stories, columns, and recently, blogs–some inspired, some not, many not worth finishing.

In all my life, however, and in all my readings, today is a day for my calendar, for this is the day I read the worst column–indeed, the worst thing–I’ve ever seen in any broadcast medium with an audience of any size. It is something so ignorant, incoherent, demonstrably false, fevered, and poisonous that I could not not finish reading it. Having now read it, and having since hosed out my wastebasket, I can confidently conclude beyond a reasonable doubt and to a mathematical certainty that never, ever has a mind so small lifted its knuckles from the floor of a cage to fling a turd so mighty against a piece of newsprint. Its author is a man so self-evidently stupid that he would have no hope of finding his own ass with the assistance of two hands and one map. It is that bad. He is that stupid.

The flinger of this turd is the Joongang Ilbo‘s “Senior Columnist” Kim Young-hie, and he flings toward America, democracy, Natan Sharansky, Christians, and (naturally enough) the Jews:

Who is Mr. Sharansky? He was a Jewish dissident in the former Soviet Union, which former President Ronald Reagan defined as “the evil empire.” The Brezhnev administration naturally arrested Mr, Sharansky. While he was in prison, the neo-cons [wink] of the Reagan administration pulled the former Soviet Union into the arms race, including the “Star Wars” program, which required an astronomical budget and drove the country to collapse. Human rights organizations across the world, including Jewish-Americans, put pressure on the Gorbachev administration. . . . His suggestion that Islamic terrorism can be wiped out by spreading democracy in the Middle East shook the minds of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and the neo-cons [wink]. One of the hidden purposes with which the neo-conservatives [wink] in Washington started a war against Iraq was to democratize the Middle East and build a condominium that the United States and Israel could jointly manage.

I will summarize. The cunning Jew Sharansky (though still just a pimply young sprout) and his cohorts “pressured” the peace-loving Soviet Union into building fifty tank divisions and a mammoth nuclear arsenal, and tragically, even into occupying half of Europe. Papa Brezhnev “naturally” shipped this dangerous prodigy of a conspirator off to the gulag, but that couldn’t stop him and his Jewish cohorts (like George Schultz, George H.W. Bush, and James Baker) from luring Boris Gromov’s 40th Army into the likudnik kill zone of Afghanistan from his puppetmaster’s chamber (brilliantly disguised as a Siberian prison cell). Today, he seeks to make North Korea safe for evangelical missionaries by plotting to subvert its “soft underbelly” in the Middle East. He means to do this by brainwashing George W. Bush (who is famous for his whimsically open mind and emphemeral beliefs) into confiscating their beloved burkas and bomb-vests and leaving them with nothing but accursed voter registration cards in his wake. All of which is really just a way to sell them condos, which is an idea I honestly did not see coming. Will the madness ever stop? Only if the moderating influence of Kim Jong Il can “tame” it.