13 January 2010: Sarah Palin Unwittingly Makes Case for Withdrawing Most of USFK (Update: Palin Denies)

SHE COULD HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT NORTH KOREA:

One of the hallmarks of a regime in financial trouble is a complicated regime of “special” exchange rates aimed at getting around the problems caused by financial mismanagement. The devaluation that Venezuela announced last week may have been a good idea, given the country’s recession, and the problems of declining oil revenues. But the way Chavez has gone about the thing is typically ham-fisted. By Sunday, he was threatening to deploy the military against . . . shopkeepers who raised prices in response to the devaluation, as if fiat were the main component of import prices. [Megan McArdle, The Atlantic]

YOUR “WE ARE ONE” MOMENT FOR TODAY, via the New York Times, now with 50% less sarcasm:

One October evening, when the students had gone camping and stayed up late, Moon Sung-il, a 14-year-old North Korean, brought tears to the South Koreans’ eyes when he recounted his two-and-a-half-year flight with other defectors that took him through China, Myanmar and a refugee camp in Bangkok. But he stunned them when he said that none of this was as daunting as a South Korean classroom.

“I could hardly understand anything the teacher said,” he said. “My classmates, who were all a year or two younger than I was, taunted me as a “˜poor soup-eater from the North.’ I fought them with my fists.

ISN’T IT CUTE when North Korea rails against censorship in KCNA?

“LET MR. SHIN’S WORDS HANG HIM:” That’s usually the best way to deal with any ass who at least refrains from violence.

SARAH PALIN DIDN’T KNOW why there were two Koreas? My views on this topic are guaranteed to please absolutely no one. On one hand, and speaking as a former USFK soldier for crying out loud, that’s the lapse of an unintelligent person, but then, my own impression of Palin has always been of a nice, decent, down-to-earth person who lacks the experience and gravitas for national office. On the other hand, Palin doesn’t seem any dumber than Harry Reid or John Edwards, any more gaffe-prone than Joe Biden, or any more dogmatic than Nancy Pelosi, yet the columnists don’t write about Reid or Pelosi, they write about Palin — constantly. Don’t even get me started with the vacuous Edwards — most of the press positively covered for him through most of the election season, while he still held delegates and leverage in a tightly contested nomination, and left the watch-dogging to The National Enquirer. This is somewhat akin to my ambivalence about Israel: one need not be especially fond of how Israel behaves at times to perceive a double standard that often looks more like an unhealthy obsession than principled criticism.

Update: Palin calls the accusation “a lie.” I sure hope so. For what it’s worth, I hated Palin’s convention speech but thought she did fine in the debate. But of course, beating Joe Biden in a debate is like beating Stephen Hawking at racket ball.

GOOGLE THREATENS TO LEAVE CHINA, refuses to help censor searches, after Chi-bots hack into activists’ e-mail accounts. Chinese fascism is eventually doing to destroy itself with this sort of arrogance and hubris, but who else will it destroy first?

AN INCH IS NEVER ENOUGH: Tensions with China, despite Clinton’s early suck-up on human rights.