Reaction to the North Korean Bomb

There is now some question as to whether North Korea’s nuclear test was a success. While there are a lot of unanswered questions, looking around the blogosphere the Republican reaction is amusing, but predictable: Blame Clinton, and take no responsibility for their own failures. Most likely it was Bill Clinton who snuck in and altered the teleprompter to have Bush call North Korea part of the Axis of Evil. It was also Clinton’s fault that Bush went into the wrong country looking for WMD, distracting him from more serious threats in North Korea and Iran.

In 2010 if anything goes wrong, can we follow their logic and blame everything on Bush instead of, hypothetically, President Kerry?

It is easy for Republicans to argue when they don’t have to worry about facts or logic. They start from the premise that Bush did everything right and it is Clinton’s fault, and then work from there.

Besides the knee jerk blaming of Clinton, there’s a lot of specious arguments in the conservative blogs. Arguments based upon how evil North Korea is don’t tell us anything we didn’t know. That’s a given. The controversy is over how we deal with the reality. Do we be tough and smart, or do we continue to follow the Bush policy of being tough but dumb?

The World War II analogies in many Republican posts are also specious. Defeating Nazi Germany was both the only response and a realistic response (and accomplished by Democrats). In a nuclear age such a conventional approach is no longer as simple. But that’s conservativism for you–look at the solutions of the past and ignore everything that has changed.

More discussion at Arms and Influence, The Duck of Minerva, Bradford Plumer, and Tapped.

Update: More worth reading at Unclaimed Territory and Baloon Juice.

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