Speak Softly and Carry a Big Teleprompter by Mark Steyn on National Review Online

"What does a nuclear madman have to do to get America’s attention? On Memorial Day, the North Koreans detonated “an underground atomic device many times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” as my old colleagues at the Irish Times put it. You’d think that’d rate something higher than “World News In Brief,” see foot of page 37. But instead Washington was consumed by the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, who apparently has a “compelling personal story.”

Doesn’t Kim Jong Il have a compelling personal story? Like Sonia, he grew up in a poor neighborhood (North Korea), yet he’s managed to become a nuclear power, shattering the glass ceiling to take his seat at the old nuclear boys’ club. Isn’t that an inspiring narrative? Once upon a time you had to be a great power, one of the Big Five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, to sit at the nuclear table: America, Britain, France, Russia, China, the old sons of power and privilege. But now the mentally unstable scion of an impoverished no-account backwater with a GDP lower than that of Zimbabwe has joined their ranks: Celebrate diversity!" Read all of it for goodness sake.


Speak Softly and Carry a Big Teleprompter by Mark Steyn on National Review Online