Open Sources: The Rodney Dangerfield of American Politics

That would be Jimmy Carter, who having recently snubbed by Kim Jong Il and Lee Myung Bak, gets no respect from Hillary Clinton.

So, the North Koreans are unhappy with Fox News for reporting that North Korea is growing more dope than ever, and we get to witness a case study of how North Korea strong-arms foreign journalists (I use the term loosely).

Personally, I’m a little hesitant to endorse the conclusion that North Korea is increasing the production of any particular crop (in this case, opium) solely based on satellite imagery of crop patterns in one area; I’d like to see a little more corroboration from other sources. I don’t think there’s any question that the North Korea government has long manufactured and exported illicit drugs as a matter of state policy — and still does — but most recent evidence suggests that North Korea’s dope industry has suffered from the country’s general industrial decline, and that increasingly, the expertise and materials needed to manufacture drugs are being diverted into the markets, like almost every other salable commodity.

Today, reports about drugs in North Korea are usually about the rise of drug addiction as a domestic social problem, and the regime’s periodic crackdowns on drug use and trafficking.

There are now 21,000 North Korean defectors in the South. But I have something far more jarring to show you today — this chart, showing the number of North Koreans arrested as illegal aliens in Thailand in recent years:

You know the end must be near when even North Koreans learn to laugh at their own government.