Well, good for Bill

The news stories say Bill didn't do the negotiations himself, the State Dept. did, and the big thing Kim Jong-Il got was a chance to save face by releasing the two American women and having a former U.S. president come by on what was treated as a state visit. Victor Cha says NK's MO is to go out on a ledge and sometimes they have to be helped off it, Whatever, it's hard to be anything but pleased that the two are out of NK. As mentioned before, the hard labor camps are horrific. Word is that Kim didn't want the issue of the two captives to be a distraction in future negotiations over nukes. That assume negotiations are in the future.

I don't know why we don't just offer a non-aggression promise and restore normal diplomatic relations. NK, perhaps more so after Kim's death, is trying clumsi;y to get reconnected with the larger world. Give them diplomat9ic relations and nothing else -- espoecially not anguished attention to their every attention-getting action. It's a pipsqueak country and having nukes doesn't change that. Save the anguish for a real threat -- except that the U.S. doesn't really face one worth mobilizing about and is unlikely to, and political leaders thrive on the appearance oif threats.

Clinton might just do it

My guess is that Bill Clinton would not have gotten involved if he didn't have some assurances that there was at least a chance of being successful at bringing American quasi-journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee home. I certainly hope he facilitates their freedom. It strikes me that this isn't a bad kind of thing for former presidents to do. They have a certain cachet, and being out of office they have a certain freedom of movement and action that serving presidents simply don't. That doesn't imply automatic applause for everything an ex might do -- Jimmy Carter has sometimes been an embarrassment, and it's hard to imagine Dubya being much of an international negotiator.

I hope the incident -- even though Bill will probably downplay it during active negotiations -- will bring more attention to North Korea's incredibly brutal hard-labor camps, described in this WaPo piece and to which Ling and Lee were sentenced. Not many people emerge alive from them.

Obama wins in South Carolina

Here's the post I did for the Registers Horserace'08 blog on Saturday night after Barack Obama trounced Hillary Clinton, getting an absolute majority. I also have to say that listening to his victory speech almost made me appreciate Obama as an orator, which quite frankly had eluded me until then. But his speech had a cadence and rythm, a sense of when to pause and when to continue, that almost made one believe that this was the guy to bring about change (although the nature of the change was still kinda vague.

Andrew Sullivan, who confesses that he's rather enchanted with Barack, wrote that he had listened to dozens of Obama speeches, and this was the best he's heard. Well, maybe that's it, I found myself somewhat impressed by the best. But still only somewhat impressed. I think most pundits have pretty low standards for public speaking. Barack is good, but he's not that good.

I do think it's interesting that Ted Kennedy has endorsed Obama, along with Caroline. It suggests sttrongly that plenty of Democrats are fed up with Billary, and that there is a Democratic tradition that preceded the Clintons that they'd like to preserve. Fascinating that so many Demcrats and liberals are letting loose on the Clintons (Frank Rich at the NYT is almost apoplectic, though that's hardly untypical) now that they've seen Bubba exercising his campaign skills on a Democrat instead of on Republicans