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):

1. Since people are being willfully obtuse in interpreting this tweet, I'm going to delete and spell out, slowly, why North Korean charm offensive is surprisingly successful. pic.twitter.com/io7hN1PuXw

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 11, 2018

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:

This gives the political maneuvers a transcendent emotional value for the public. It's not just maneuvering. US always fails to understand this, but this time much worse than usual.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 11, 2018

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:

Actual graphic of North Korean charm offensive https://t.co/W0mc202vsx

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 11, 2018

It's very courageous to attack Kim Jong-un regime. What are you doing to get Trump to adopt a Korea policy that recognizes a military attack on DPRK would kill 10 million South Koreans? South is forced to work with North as long as Trump people continue what they're doing.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 11, 2018

https://t.co/zFOcgwJXt9

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 11, 2018

South Koreans know exactly what kind of monster Kim Jong-un is but they still trust him better than Trump, who treats them--the world's fourth most important economy--like a minor annoyance in his project to show the world he has a bigger dick than Jong-un https://t.co/LUBTH97TcO

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 11, 2018

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

Oops wrong link https://t.co/wEFiWeaJbQ

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 11, 2018

In this way supporting North Korean participation in Olympics isn't support of North Korea--it's support of the South conducting its own foreign policy while US is AWOL. They have no choice, and they're handling it well.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 11, 2018

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:

If you want to trot over that history, the argument is that the Clinton deal would have worked if Bush administration hadn't reneged on the commitments. https://t.co/72vrEhL3W8

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 11, 2018

obviously I support the Iran deal, therefore you can't even click the links I post because god forbid you should ever learn anything new. Go back to your bubble.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 11, 2018

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.