Roger Simon ponders at PJMedia.com the impact on Trump haters of the latest North Korean war of words.
One of the unspoken ‘indications’ in the medical sense of the ever-metastasizing Trump Derangement Syndrome is that the sufferers have a deep conscious/unconscious fear that Trump is right. What if the man they have excoriated unremittingly as a barbarian-racist-xenophobe-homophobe -misogynist-nitwit turns out to have been on the correct side of a fair number of issues on which they have failed, sometimes miserably, for decades? Talk about personality disintegration — it would be hari-kari meets the Wicked Witch of the West. Well, emotionally anyway.
The current North Korea crisis is a perfect case in point. Susan Rice — has this woman no shame — took to the pages of The New York Times to inveigh against Trump for “bluster” regarding the NORKS. The integrity-challenged former national security adviser was far from alone, however. Virtually all Democrats and their local media minions plus a good swatch of Republicans (including repellently vengeful John McCain) criticized the president for the same thing — using blunt language to counter the crazed dictator in Pyongyang when Trump should have been “diplomatic.” …
… Perhaps what we need is a little bluster. It’s an old technique and a sound one — good cop/bad cop. It was played out well by Nixon and Kissinger when Henry went to Beijing to negotiate with Mao and Chou. Kissinger threatened to let his “madman back home” (Nixon) loose unless the Chairman cooperated and made a deal. It worked.
Now we have Trump, Tillerson, Mattis and McMaster playing various levels of good cop/bad cop. They are even reportedly working the backchannels in the old diplomatic game. Let’s hope they learn from the past and do it better this time. Color me skeptical because without a serious military threat, I doubt the Chinese will listen.
