Sunday, February 11, 2018

For the Record: Windy Olympics

Mr. Vice President and Mrs. Pence in their matching jackets in Pyeongchang, painfully aware that the baleful eyes of Madam Kim Yo-jong may be on them. Screenshot via Fox.

It's a good thing that the South Korean and North Korean athletes are competing together, as a single country in a slightly half-assed way, and an even better thing that the South Korean president Moon Jae-in is contemplating a meeting with mad North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. To say that is not to say that Kim Jong-un is a good person, and I'm getting a little cheesed with rightwingers suggesting that it is (though I'd agree with them that CNN's crush on the dictator's sister Kim Yo-jong is, ah, unnecessary):
To me, it is the South Koreans who are especially winning this initiative, and last night I tacked on a couple of additional details to Jeet Heer's thread:
And then spent the rest of the evening happily watching non-Korean skaters, and in the morning there was sour-assed Ben Shapiro, still whining, and his fans:






Should have been 13 months, obviously, and in the original thread I used that link twice:


There was some other stupid stuff after that, because these people literally cannot understand that South Korea exists, even as we're watching the Olympics, which should be adequate proof, and are baffled by the idea that anybody other than Donald J. Trump and Kim Jong-un should be involved at all:


But that bit is not important. It really made me miss Obama, though, who would have understand all these points before I did and managed to communicate them in a way that people like Tom Friedman sort of got and figured out a way to draw a little advantage out of the thing for the United States—unlike Vice President Mike Pence, who was diplomatically unable to attend the state dinner and sat when others stood through the opening ceremony, as if he thought (as Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy quipped) it was a good idea to refuse to stand at the beginning of an athletic competition in order to protest something completely unrelated to the competition. Colin Kaepernick could not be reached for comment. Joe Biden (remembering how FDR negotiated with Stalin, the butcher of millions, and won World War II; and Nixon and Kissinger with the even bloodier Mao Zedong, with results that were excellent for both countries) would have worked to make an impression on the northerners.
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