John McCain on North Korea

The Senator is guest-blogging at Captain's Quarters, and speaks a truth the Democrats do not want to hear, and that the media is unwilling to report:

The worst thing we could do is accede to North Korea’s demand for bilateral talks. When has rewarding North Korea’s bad behavior ever gotten us anything more than worse behavior?

I would remind Senator Hillary Clinton and other Democrats critical of Bush Administration policies that the framework agreement her husband’s administration negotiated was a failure. The Koreans received millions in energy assistance. They diverted millions in food assistance to their military. And what did they do? They secretly enriched uranium.

Prior to the agreement, every single time the Clinton Administration warned the Koreans not to do something -- not to kick out the IAEA inspectors, not to remove the fuel rods from their reactor -- they did it. And they were rewarded every single time by the Clinton Administration with further talks. We had a carrots and no sticks policy that only encouraged bad behavior. When one carrot didn’t work, we offered another.

And this is the foreign policy the Democrats want us to return to; and the media casts as "the good old days", while refusing to connect the dots from Bill Clinton's appeasement to North Korea's nuclear test.

History will draw the lines that paint the picture, the way we see today how the European attempts to appease Hitler led directly to WWII. But it is amazing that with the hindsight of a historical parallel we absolutely refuse to learn the lesson, instead demanding that we be marched off the same cliff again. And the media will more than happily push us over the edge - it fears greatly printing anything that they feel might harm the chances of the Democratic Party in '06 and '08. Instead, it highlights criticism of the President's policies with little balance or perspective, and quotes John Kerry as if Americans view him as some sort of authoritative figure . Hey folks, he lost the election, remember? And quite deservedly so, if he so blithely uses an international crisis for momentary partisan gain.

But you'll never hear that point of view, either...only continued carping and sniping from the Democrats, without any offering of a logical alternative course of action. And with a media that is little more than their personal "amen' corner, any debate on these issues will more or less be silenced, and thoughtful analysis will be nonexistent. Just what the country needs in this time and place in history.

Will we wake up by November, without North Korea or al-Qeada having to do it for us?

UPDATE: It never ends in the media; in a Kafka-esque perversion of the truth, the Washington Post blames Bush for starting the whole thing with his "Axis of Evil" speech. I'll let Michael Rubin at The Corner answer for me:

To condemn the Axis of Evil speech is to condemn Bush for prescience. He didn’t create the Axis of Evil; rather, he voiced the problem. And if that shocked European diplomats, well too bad. If it’s a choice between national security and enabling European diplomats to remain secure in their illusions, I’d hope both Republicans and Democrats would favor the former.

Well, Galileo got life imprisonment for having the nerve to proclaim that the Earth revolves around the sun; seems like that's exactly what the incoming Democratic committee chairmen would like to impose upon W., if they can achieve victory in the fall elections...funny to see them acting so much like the Church they claim to despise...