Insults fly across the continents
by digby
So everyone’s upset that Pyongyang is personally insulting the president, and it’s a legit complaint. They used a racist term that’s clearly repulsive. But as a nation, let’s not get too sanctimonious about this sort of bad behavior:
Here’s one extraordinary scene from Bob Woodward’s book, “Bush at War:”
“The President sat forward in his chair. I thought he might jump up, he became so emotional about the North Korean leader. ‘I loathe Kim Jong Il!’ Bush shouted, waving his finger in the air. ‘I’ve got a visceral reaction to this guy, because he is starving his people.’”
And another, from Newsweek in 2002:
“He’s starving his own people,” Bush said about Kim Jong Il. Bush compared Kim to “a spoiled child at a dinner table” and called him a “pygmy.” The senators were “stunned,” with one of them telling Newsweek magazine that “it was like in church, when the sermon goes on too long and you’re not sure what the point is. Nobody dared look at anybody else.”
When that comment reached Pyongyang, a top official asked an American scholar, “How can we deal with you when your leader doesn’t show us even a minimum of respect?”
Speaking of sanctimonious …
It appears that the story of the Sony hack is under more scrutiny as security experts question the official line much more aggressively. It has always struck me as a dicey narrative and all the pearl clutching over the “attack” on our way of life by North Korea has been hard to take considering what it is we’re allegedly defending and the industry’s usual willingness to do whatever it takes to appease anyone who objects to political content in their films — and how closely they work with the CIA and the rest of the government.
Hopefully this part of the controversy is over. The hack itself brings up many important issues about privacy and security — and how Hollywood really works. Those are the issues at the heart of all this and it would be nice if we could unwrap ourselves from the flag for a bit to take a closer look at it.
.