Hold on, hold on, the sound you hear is Talleyrand whirring in his grave! Check out this article from this morning’s Washington Times: U.S. Reverses North Korea Policy. The State Department, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to release the now infamous $25,000000 directly to North Korea, and “will now rely on Pyongyang’s ‘good faith’ to ensure that funds released yesterday from a Macao bank are not misused.” State Department spokesman Sean “McCormack said the North Koreans had promised ‘to spend the money for the betterment of the North Korean people,’ and not for the personal benefit of its officials.” McCormack continued,

“In any negotiation, you are going to get to a point where every party … wants something, and they are not going to get it exactly in the form that they want it — and that’s part of the negotiating process,” he said.
“You compromise, but you compromise within reason,” he said. “You compromise in order to achieve a larger objective and the important thing is that, along the way, you not abandon [your] principles … and what you want to achieve at the end of the process.”
“This is a process in which good-faith actions will be met in turn by good faith, which results in a building of confidence, which allows all the parties to make some of the tough decisions that are going to be needed if we are going to all achieve our goals,” Mr. McCormack said.

This would be hilarious were it not so pitifully lame. Why don’t we throw in the Liberty Bell too! A careful and reasoned review of the Kim case should have shown the folk at State that constant caving to his demands in the hope that he will then do as we ask in “good faith” is an unending enterprise that never yields positive results. Indeed, the Clinton/Albright cave ushered in the era of Nuclear Kim. With the Bush/Rice/Hill collapse, we will next be confronted with Intercontinental Ballistic Kim. Nancy Pelosi may want to start work on her home fallout shelter ASAP. There will come a point when the “good faith” amnesiac map Condi and her chums are carefully following will meet the harsh reality of the actual geography that is the nature of Kim Jong Il. What price will the rest of us pay for this education sentimentale at the State Department?