Kim Jong Il goes nuclear; let’s see Bush screw up North Korean diplomacy even more

(I’m assuming this wasn’t a Rove conspiracy to drive Mark Foley off the news pages.)

According to both North Korea and South Korea, it sounds official: North Korea is a nuclear power.

Should this scare us more than, say, Pakistan’s being a nuclear power?

Perhaps, in some ways.

First, given that we don’t know whether Pakistan’s rogue nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, is under house detention, or more in the way of house leisure, who’s to say the old Pyongyang//Islamabad connection might not get a jump start?

At the least, Pakistan’s President Musharraf can threaten something like that the next time our own Maximum Leader, George W(hhhaattt?) Bush, talks to him like a 5-year-old, not a fellow head of state.

Second, who’s to say that Kim won’t try to rev up some backdoor connection even without official, or semi-official via the ISI, Pakistani agreement? Or with Iran?

I don’t know if Clinton would have stopped this or not. But, he couldn’t have bollixed up the last five-plus years of diplomacy any worse than it has been.