North Korea

So the NK's blew up a test nuke. Oh, good. So now we can put aside a few back-and forth claims about what they're up to and just focus on the fact that this is the greatest foreign policy failure for the US ever. Not that it solves anything to just name it - but maybe if enough voters get it through their heads, we can make some changes.

Though how we change out of this I really don't know. The most crazy despot on the planet - a guy who, by all accounts, is almost exactly the same person as the puppet that played him in Team America: World Police - has a working nuclear weapon. Stunning.

The story's been told better by better writers out there, but essentially the Junta took over a relationship with the NK's where they were not building a bomb, had shut down their bomb-making reactor, and the UN had cameras in the place. Fast forward six years of colossal bungling, and they're test-firing a nuke.

Does it matter what's gone on those six years? The bottom line is that a country that is bugs-on-garbage wild has a nuke and the means to make more.

Part of the problem is that a bunch of silver-spoon private school kids tried to play a bullies game. The W and Cheney crowd grew up with big money. There was no gang war, nobody got the turds beat out of them, nobody pulled a knife or a gun.

When I was in high school, I went from the Silver Spoon Academy to the local suburban middle-class school. It was a tough transition - not exactly the 'hood or anything even close, but a place with enough hard lessons for any private school kid to learn a bit. And what you learn first is that you don't talk what you can't bring.

If you want to take a kids lunch money, you better be prepared to go get it. In Silver Spoon Academy you might hide Biff's books, but that will get you a good talking-to.

So when the lah-dee-dah Junta started acting the tough guy, street psycho Kim was ready for them to bring it. Only it never got brought. Which just proved how inefficacious the Junta Nancies really are.

Now, with the military hopelessly mired in the unsolvable Iraqi mess, there's nothing to be done. Hell, even if our best and brightest hadn't been pointlessly squandered in Iraq, what would they do? Invade a country known to have nukes?

Hardly.

The best we can hope for now is a universal denunciation of NK which might bring cooler heads to the bargaining table.

The US is no longer part of any real solution - we haven't been for years. This is part of the proof.

I honestly never thought I'd live to see America brought so low.