Mocking Trump on Korea <br>Could Boomerang on Left <br>If Kim Does Choose War

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Kim Jong-un’s latest missile launch looks like a bull’s-eye — smack in the Democrats’ left eye. Leftists keep claiming it’s President Trump’s rhetoric on North Korea that’s dangerous. What about their own?

The Democrats, their allies, and non-left Trump critics in recent weeks have been depicting the president as crazy, childish and mongering war. “How do we let the North Koreans know that *we* don’t support this guy either?” tweets civil-rights activist DeRay Mckesson.

“We can live with a nuclear North Korea,” writes Max Boot, no leftist, in the Daily News. Over the weekend, a Washington Post editorial urged that in the age of Trump, America should retreat from keeping its missiles on a “launch ready alert.”

If the goal is truly to deter war with North Korea, Mr. Trump’s critics are painting themselves into a corner. After all, what effect would it have on Trump’s ability to conduct diplomacy and cobble together a coalition to constantly undermine the president’s support and to mock his seriousness?

The smoke of Mr. Kim’s latest launch had barely cleared than New York Times star columnist Nicholas Kristof put up a video of his visit to Pyongyang — reporting that North Koreans are full of “outrage” over Trump.

That footage was shot after Trump’s “fire and fury” speech at the United Nations. At the time, a vice chairman of the Democratic Party, Congressman Keith Ellison Minnesota, suggested Mr. Kim was saner than Mr. Trump.

“Kim Jong-un — the world always thought he was not a responsible leader,” The Washington Post quoted Ellison as saying. “Well, he’s acting more responsible than this guy,” he said, referring to Trump.

Mr. Ellison made his remarks at a Netroots conference, which, the Post reported, greeted his gibe with “murmurs of agreement.” The Democrat later claimed he regretted his remark.

Then there’s the hard left. We glimpsed it when a woman arrested at Durham, North Carolina, for helping topple a statue of a Confederate soldier turned out to be a partisan of the Workers World Party of the U.S. As recently as September, Workers World published a “Dear Comrade Kim Jong-un” letter. It abjectly assured the North Korean dictator of its “continued solidarity, in word and in deed.”

Meantime, the Guardian newspaper published a list of insults between America and North Korea and asked: “Can you spot which phrases come from the mouth of an outspoken, unpredictable and dangerous leader, and which come from North Korea’s Kim Jong-un?”

It would be one thing were this taking place in a void. A recent survey, though, reported growing acceptance of Communism and socialism among American youth. The survey is from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

The foundation was set up after the fall of the Soviet Union. Its new report suggests that an astounding one in two millennials “would rather live in a socialist or communist country than a capitalist democracy.”

Which gets back to Korea. Where are the Democrats and their leftist echo chamber going with all this? What kind of predicament will they be in if, God forbid, war actually breaks out between America and North Korea?

Some Democrats in Congress, Newsweek reports, have been nudging legislation to block Mr. Trump from making the first strike with nuclear — or conventional, the fine print suggests — weapons.

“It’s time for Trump to just stop escalating the crisis through reckless military threats,” Senator Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said.

Mr. Markey wants us to guarantee we won’t “topple” Mr. Kim’s regime. Yet that’s how we got in this predicament in the first place. We accepted an armistice instead of pressing for a full defeat of the Reds.

Now the Norks claim to have an H-bomb. When Mr. Kristof, in his video, tells an aide in North Korea’s foreign ministry he opposed America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, the thug mocks Mr. Trump, calling him a “pathetic guy and a scattermouth.”

No doubt Mr. Kristof was in a tight spot, being, at the time, behind enemy lines. Yet the intrepid columnist (and he is that) sat there and offered no defense of America’s freely elected leader.

The silence was deafening, echoing that of other liberals seeking to undermine Trump’s credibility abroad. What options will they be left with if Mr. Kim answers with war?

This column first appeared in the New York Post.


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