Monday, March 4, 2013

George Stephanopoulos Has "No Hate" For Dennis Rodman's N. Korea Trip


George Stephanopoulos Has "No Hate" For Dennis Rodman's N. Korea Trip
By Katie Pavlich
3/4/2013

Former NBA player and all-around freakshow Dennis Rodman went to North Korea last week to visit with newly minted dictator Kim Jong Un. This is outrageous and ridiculous for many reasons, which I'll get into below, and should be condemned by Democrats, Republicans and the press. That being said, leave it to former Clinton communications director and ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos to have "no hate" for Rodman's trip.



First of all, Stephanopoulos is ignoring Kim Jong Un's most recent nuclear test and his plans to launch a new intermediate-range ballistic missile any day now.

North Korea appears to be preparing for a test launch of a new intermediate-range ballistic missile that would further heighten tensions in the region following an underground nuclear test earlier this month.

Test preparations for the launch of a road-mobile Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile were spotted recently by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Signs at a remote missile base include indicators of fueling for the road-mobile Musudan missile, classified as an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), said officials familiar with intelligence reports.

North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test on Feb. 12, prompting international condemnation. It was the third test since 2006 and raised new concerns among Western intelligence agencies about whether North Korea is close to fashioning a warhead small enough to fit on a missile.

Second, this is a country in which leaders literally starve children.

There were times and places in North Korea in the mid-1990s, as a great famine wiped out perhaps 10 percent of the population, that children feared to sleep in the open. Some of them had wandered in from the countryside to places like Chongjin, an industrial town on the coast, where they lived on streets and in railroad stations. It wasn’t unusual for people to disappear; they were dying by the thousands, maybe millions. But dark rumors were spreading, too horrifying to believe, too persistent to ignore.

“Don’t buy any meat if you don’t know where it comes from,” one Chongjin woman whispered to a friend, who later defected and recounted the conversation to the reporter Barbara Demick for her book, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.” Fear of cannibalism, like the famine supposedly driving it, spread. People avoided the meat in streetside soup vendors and warned children not to be alone at night. At least one person in Chongjin was arrested and executed for eating human flesh.

And last, we're taking political advice about North Korea from Dennis Rodman now because basketball or something? What could go wrong? The good news is, during Stephanopoulos' actual interview with Rodman, he wasn't so tolerant of the trip.

View Video Here:

When Rodman said he planned on going back, Stephanopoulos gave him a copy of the Human Rights Watch report on North Korea, telling him he might "learn something."
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To read more about North Korea, click here.
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To read another article by Katie Pavlich, click here.

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