nyt Archives - Where Is The Outrage?

The United States and North Korea — part two (the Bush years)

A few years ago, I wrote this post on North Korea. I was trying to understand what was going on in North Korea and how our response was causing a negative or positive feedback. Because North Korea has strategically jumped back into the limelight, I thought was worth reviewing what I knew or at least what I thought I knew about North Korea. It looks like I hit the nail on the head.

North Korea

I highly recommend that you read yesterday’s post on North Korea. I looked at North Korea’s history of nuclear interest dating back to late 1950s and early 1960s.

To use a football metaphor, I’m not going to tell you that the Clinton administration had taken a football (North Korea’s nuclear issues) down to the two-yard line and all the Bush administration had to do was to carry the ball over the goal line. President George Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary Colin Powell needed to do much more than that. In retrospect, Bush was ill-prepared for North Korea. I have no idea how much he was briefed. I have no idea if alternative viewpoints (outside of the neoconservative line of thinking) were presented to the president. (Here’s a North Korean timeline.)

In my opinion, foreign policy is like three-dimensional chess. There are lots of moving pieces. You need to be very smart and very prepared in order to anticipate your opponent’s move. In foreign policy you are playing multiple opponents at the same time.

As far as I know, there were no high-level discussions about how to approach the North Koreans when President Bush announced to the South Korean president that he was unclear if North Korea was holding up their end of the bargain (the Agreed Framework). He basically stated that North Koreans were liars and cheats and could not be trusted. “We’re not certain as to whether or not they’re keeping all the terms of all agreements.” (NYT) While such a provocative statement would not get a second look in downtown Baltimore, in the world of diplomacy it was a slap in the face. The big question is, if the United States were to break off discussions with North Korea, which was a basic tenet of the “Agreed Framework,” then what? What leverage did we have against a country that is already isolated? Was it possible that we could squeeze China or Russia in order to use their leverage against North Korea? None of this had been discussed prior to Bush’s statement. At least, not to the best of my knowledge. This all happened in early March of 2001. By September of 2001, we were focused on Afghanistan and some in the Bush administration had already begun to focus on Iraq. (more…)

By ecthompsonmd|2013-04-04T19:01:08-04:00April 3rd, 2013|North Korea, Pakistan|Comments Off

Misquoting Obama for political gain

Here’s what the President said at Lorain Community College on April 18, 2012.

Investing in a community college, just like investing in a new road or a new highway or broadband lines that go into rural communities, these investments are not part of some grand scheme to redistribute wealth. They’ve been made by Democrats and Republicans for generations because they benefit all of us. That’s what leads to strong, durable economic growth. That’s how America became an economic superpower. That’s how we built the Transcontinental Railroad. That’s why we’ve got the best universities and colleges in the world. That’s why we have cutting-edge research that takes place here, and that then gets translated into new jobs and new businesses, because somebody did the groundwork. We created a foundation for those of us to prosper.

Somebody gave me an education. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Michelle wasn’t. But somebody gave us a chance — just like these folks up here are looking for a chance.

Here’s what Fox News’ Steve Doocy reported, “Unlike some people, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.”

By inserting just a few words, there is an attempt to turn a speech about opportunity and investment in the middle class into some jab at Mitt Romney. This is sad. A “news” organization should at least get the facts right. Worse, NYT and WaPo passed on this misinformation to their readers without doing the homework necessary to look up the quote. There is no excuse for this kind of lazy reporting. None.

By ecthompsonmd|2012-04-23T09:27:47-04:00April 23rd, 2012|Media, Party Politics|Comments Off

Makes me wanna cry

I hear all of this talk about how children are our future. We need to do this and that for our children. Then we cut funding to programs that have been proven to benefit children. This is why I’m balding. I’m pulling my hair out.

From NYT:

What is a humdrum routine for millions of students around the country — riding to and from school on a yellow bus — has become a thing of the past for Aubrey. Faced with a budget shortfall, the Hutto Independent School District stopped providing bus service to him and other students who live within a two-mile walk of a campus. The move saved the district $25,000.

Aubrey, a sophomore at Hutto High School, now spends 20 minutes walking one mile to school in the morning and another 20 minutes on the return trip in the afternoon.

“I’m like, ‘Wow, I’m not going to have a bus?’ ” he said. “I’ve walked home one time when it was raining. I didn’t like it at all. I was soaked.”

For Hutto and the 1,264 other public school districts in Texas, this has been the year of doing without. Texas lawmakers cut public education financing by roughly $5.4 billion to balance the state’s two-year budget during the last legislative session, with the cuts taking effect this school year and next.

The budget reductions that districts large and small have had to make have transformed school life in a host of ways — increasing class sizes, reducing services and supplies and thinning the ranks of teachers, custodians, librarians and others, school administrators said.

Like chief executives of struggling corporations, superintendents have been cutting back on everything from paper to nurses and have had to become increasingly creative about generating revenue. They are selling advertising space on the sides of buses and on district Web sites, scaling back summer school, charging parents if their children take part in athletics or cheerleading and adding periods in the school day so fewer teachers can accommodate more students.

I would just like to personally thank Governor Perry and the Texas legislature for screwing up the Texas school system even more than George W. Bush.

By ecthompsonmd|2013-11-03T17:13:09-04:00April 10th, 2012|Education|1 Comment