Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

North Korean rhetoricians and weirdo American politicos sound like they’re exchanging ideas and lines with each other.

Kim Jong-Un says he needs nuclear warheads “for self-defense.” Sound familiar? Isn’t that sort of like the National Rifle Association’s claim that everyone needs a gun to fend off the bad guys who also have guns?

Seems either North Korea is borrowing lines from the NRA or the NRA is copycatting the DPRK. Both sides have a lot of sympathizers. Many people believe the NRA’s got the right idea in thinking that anyone should be able to buy an automatic weapon that can blast off 30-40 shots with one big trigger squeeze.

And from what I read a lot of people think it’s quite understandable that North Korea has to have nukes when the U.S. does crazy things such as conduct war games every year. I’ve heard Donald Gregg, a very nice guy who was once U.S. ambassador to South Korea, justifying North Korea’s nuclear program on the grounds of self-defense.

The basic principle is the same. You fire your weapon at me, and I’m firing back. Ok, Kim Jong-Un is talking about nukes, but what good will they do in self-defense? I heard Robert Fisk, Middle East expert for the Independent of London, call Kim Jong-Un “a crackpot” the other day in a television interview.

That should put the kid in about the same league as the nuts who justify automatic weapons as needed to stop other people from shooting up school kids or opening fire in a crowded theater.

That’s not all. North Korean rhetoric writers are having fun attacking the “reptile media” in the west.

Previously they reserved that accolade for Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which may actually have deserved the honor, but now they’re expanding it to cover the entire Western media. Where have we heard that one before? Didn’t I hear some right-winger in the U.S. attacking media people as “reptiles” or maybe snakes slithering around for those liberal news organizations? Did he get this term from the DPRK, or did the DPRK get it from him?

The similarity in verbiage is intriguing. When you’re talking about crackpots, it gets hard to distinguish between those in Pyongyang and the home-grown ones. One might say, yes, but we have the freedom to disagree in the U.S., and anyway these American nuts are only talking about semi-automatic weapons, not nukes. Right, but what happens when they get the idea they need to extend their constitutionally sacred “right” a few steps, all for defending the precious freedom to bear arms, and do away with those who oppose them? That could be a problem.

The Americans, though, have come up with a great way of really annoying the North Koreans that the DPRK is not going to be able to emulate any time soon. That’s to fly a B2 stealth bomber under their noses and see a few hundred thousand zealots turn up in Kim Il-Sung Square screaming anti-American epithets.

If that’s all it takes to get the North Koreans worked up, maybe Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel should send more B2’s on flights around the periphery of North Korea. How about a few runs up the east and west coasts just to see if the North Koreans were able to do anything about them aside from have the same fist-waving crowd show up in Kim Il-Sung square? And while they’re screaming bloody hell, how about showering them with leaflets letting everyone know the secrets of the Kim dynasty, its bank accounts and the number of people it’s sent to die in the gulag system?

I’m just kidding, of course. (Got to add that for the benefit of those who, believe it or not, would think I was being serious.)

Blame Kim Jong-Un for turning the whole show into farce with that crazy photograph of him sitting at a mostly empty desk with a map on the wall showing where he might order those nuke-tipped missiles to go.

People thought it was cool to find their own city targeted, but no one talked about the headgear of the four generals behind him. Two were wearing saucepan hats that looked like you could boil eggs in, and the other two had huge round circular numbers that might be good for frying eggs. Surely there was a reason for the different hat styles? Anyone care to guess?

Whatever, they ought to be making them for export. They could even run them off on one of those assembly lines operated by South Korean companies in the Kaesong industrial complex. That should guarantee the North Koreans won’t make good on their threat to shut it down.

  Kaesong industrial complex, Kim Jong-Un, National Rifle Association, Radio Free Asia, Seriously now, this rhetorical warfare is getting out of hand (just kidding), Voice of America