Cheap Seats 2017Kim Jong-Un-Believable - 09/20
By Rich Trzupek
We are sorry to interrupt the current program of people freaking out over the possibility of going to war with what is essentially the Crabwell Corners (Petticoat Junction reference – look it up) of the modern world.
If you look for “Earth at Night Map” using your search engine of choice, the difference between South and North Korea is striking. South of the 38th parallel there is the plethora of lights you would expect to see in a densely-populated modern nation. North of the 38th there are like a couple of 25 watt lightbulbs somewhat visible in the vicinity of the North Korean capital of Pyongyang.
That tells you all you need to know about the sophistication of this rogue military state of 25 million. Through no fault of their own, North Korean citizens lived in a backward, economically impotent country.
That doesn’t mean that the Supreme Leader With The Supremely Most Unflattering Haircut of Any Supreme Leader Ever can’t spend what income he can get his hands on to build nuclear weapons and rockets to deliver them. Thanks to supreme indifference and wishful thinking from administrations Clinton through Obama, he’s managed to develop both.
But, as deluded as the man obviously is, I don’t think the Supreme Blob is interested in committing national or personal suicide. Any guy who scores 38 under par the first time he plays a round of golf clearly has much to live for.
The key to controlling Kim is, of course, China, the nation that enables what is in effect a middle-aged bum living in their basement. I gotta believe that Trump is working behind the scenes to get China to stop the bum from making a nuisance of himself.
It is, to be sure, a delicate problem for China. They surely don’t want a unified Korea, particularly a unified capitalist Korea that would be at least a major economic competitor and possibly a military threat just across the Yalu River.
Rumor has it that China was planning to replace the Supreme Idiot with this half-brother, Kim Jong-Nam – who was presumably more pliable (aka: sane) – but El Supremo got wind of it and half-bro gets knocked off.
Which leaves China in the position of dealing with the Supreme Nutjob, but doing so in a way that doesn’t make it appear that China is doing the bidding of the United States. I think they’ll figure it out, eventually.
In the mean-time, Kim’s saber-rattling has all the credibility of a child who threatens to hold his breath till he turns blue. And no, neither the President nor Mad-Dog Mattis are going to do anything pre-emptively.
That leaves us with our other nuclear rogue state: Iran. That’s a more troublesome problem. Presumably there are some relatively sane people among the mullahs that run Iran, but there are clearly a number of fundamentalist religious fanatics in the mix.
Most Shia believe that the Twelfth Imam, or “the Mahdi”, will return to bring justice to earth, at which time the entire planet will convert to Islam, or rather those who survive the slaughter of those unfortunate people who refuse to convert to Islam.
So, when does the Mahdi make his appearance? Many agree with Ayatollah Ibrahim Amini, a professor at the Islamic Religious Learning Centre in Qom. Amini quotes Muhammed as saying: “Listen to the good news about the Mahdi! He will rise at the time when people will be faced with severe conflict and the earth will be hit by a violent quake. He will fill the earth with justice and equity as it is filled with injustice and tyranny.”
If a “severe conflict” is a necessary prerequisite to bring back the Mahdi, then initiating that conflict and the “great quake” of a nuclear explosion would seem to be a good way do that. One hopes that cooler heads will prevail in Tehran, but neither the US, nor Israel, should proceed under the assumption that they actually will.
E-mail: rich@examinerpublications.com
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