Shit. Not the Hiker again. /// EDIT oops. /// UNEDIT nonoops
President Clinton met Kim in Hanoi. The meeting ended sooner than expected, and now President Clinton is playing the Hiker tune again. President Clinton is running on and on about the "bad things" that happened to Spy Warmbier.

The Hiker is a long-standing USA war-starting device. On its first use in 1960, the Hiker was honestly described. Spy pilot Gary Powers crashed in Russia, and we used him as an escalator. More recent Hikers in Persia and Iraq and Korea are dishonest. Everyone knows the Hikers are really spies, because actual tourists and missionaries couldn't get into the places where these spies were caught.

Nevertheless, our dysgovernment and demonic media crash through all facts and common sense, treating the spy as an innocent hostage of the country we're preparing to obliterate.

Earlier in this NoKo process, President Clinton had been passively on the side of peace. He was "negotiating" with Kim while the real peacemakers were getting peace done. The real peacemakers were happy to let President Clinton save face. As long as his infantile ego was satisfied, he wasn't actually interfering with the actual process.

Now it looks like he's falling back into normal obliteration mode. Shit.

= = = = EDIT = = = = =

My seven-second rule got me in trouble here. I turned on the radio, heard the usual shit, turned off. If I had listened a bit longer, I would have heard that Trump is actually REVERSING the usual Hiker shit. He stated that Kim treated Spy Warmbier properly. Astonishing!

= = = = = UNEDIT the next day! = = = =

Via ZH: Trump had to walk back his (perhaps accidental) reversal of normal Hiker policy.

President Trump on Friday went into full damage-control mode over his widely-panned claim that Kim Jong Un was unaware that US college student Otto Warmbier had been tortured, tweeting "I hold North Korea responsible" for Warmbier's "mistreatement and death."

So my initial automatic assumption was right after all. Violations of the seven-second rule are always "accidental" and will be Rectified quickly.

= = = = =

On the exact other hand: Gabbard gets it.

Trump's holding onto our failed regime-change war policies is why NK holds onto nukes. Kim sees what we did in Iraq, Libya, Syria, & fears he's next. Without ending our regime-change war policies, Kim will cling to his nukes as a deterrent.

This is blatantly obvious, and many non-politicians (including me) have been hammering on this point for a long time. I've never heard the point from a politician. Good for Gabbard.
  ¶ 11:57 PM