The refusal of North Korea to negotiate with Secretary of State Rice highlights the absurdity of America’s policy of trying to negotiate with North Korea in the first place. The Associated Press yesterday quoted North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency as quoting a North Korean government spokesman saying of Ms. Rice, “Such woman bereft of any political logic is not the one to be dealt with by us.”

Back at the State Department daily briefing in Washington yesterday, Ms. Rice’s deputy spokesman, Adam Ereli, sounded like he was begging the North Koreans to come back to the table. “We don’t have any preconditions. We’ve said we’re ready to come back to talks without preconditions. We’ve said we have no intention of attacking or invading. And we’ve put a proposal out on the table to discuss and five out of the six members of the six-party talks want to come back to talks, are ready to come back to talks; there’s one that keeps throwing up excuses or smokescreens not to do it. They have a strategic choice.” The “one” he was referring to is North Korea.

The absurdity here is that America should be courting a negotiating session – even a six-party one – with the failed North Korean Communist dictatorship as if it were a hot date. If the North Korean regime doesn’t want to negotiate with Ms. Rice, so far as we’re concerned, it’s a win both for America and for the people of North Korea.

There’s nothing to negotiate so long as North Korea is led by a homicidal tyrant who maintains concentration camps for political prisoners. If the six-party talks collapse for good, it will open the door to an American policy aimed at liberating North Korea rather than merely preventing it from using or deploying nuclear weapons. Ms. Rice’s description of North Korea as an “outpost of tyranny” is apparently what annoyed the North Koreans. As Ms. Rice put it to the Washington Times over the weekend, “Yes, we need to solve the near-term problem of the North Korean nuclear program, but we can’t do it at the expense of being afraid to speak out about what is actually going on in North Korea.” Exactly.