Dick Morris: Bill Clinton Gave Kim Jong-il the Most Magnificent Photo Opportunity

Monday I had the opportunity to meet commentator Dick Morris, to sit in on his interview with the Washington D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, and ask him a question about his recent polling of American Jewish Democrats who voted for President Obama. In the interview, which will appear soon on the Center’s web site, Morris talked about the Obama Administration’s health care plan, Bill Clinton’s recent travels to secure the release of two American journalists from North Korea, and the aforementioned poll.

While my focus is not health care, I nonetheless found Morris’s comments interesting. He was highly critical of the Obama health care plan, arguing in essence that while the Obama administration purports to be offering care to everyone, the quality of care will suffer and the elderly, in particular, under the ‘Quality Adjusted Remaining Years’ provision of the plan, will get less. He argued that a significant portion of the 40-odd million uninsured in the U.S. are illegal immigrants, who will get more coverage under the Obama plan.

Morris spoke at greater length about national security issues, specifically Bill Clinton’s recent visit to Pyongyang, North Korea to secure release of Euna Lee and Laura Ling, two female American journalists. He pointed out that North Korea supports terrorism, supports shipping nuclear weapons to Myanmar, to Syria, and to Iran, and has kidnapped Japanese citizens as well as Americans. (To Morris’s list I would add that North Korea maintains one of the most brutal systems of political prisons in the world, in which it systematically starves and often works to death dissidents and their families – including, as a matter of state policy, their children and even grandchildren. Human rights groups estimate between 150,000 and 200,000 North Koreans are presently being tortured and killed in these camps).

“Bill Clinton,” he said, “gave Kim Jong-il the most magnificent photo opportunity. This evil regime got to pose as the good guy throughout the world.”

Morris pointed out the irony of Bill Clinton’s visit to Pyongyang to secure the journalists’ release in light of a similar visit on the part of Jimmy Carter during the Clinton years. He said that Carter’s visit in the 1990’s, as a result of which the dictator agreed to stop enriching uranium, prevented the Clinton administration from taking a tougher stance towards Kim Jong-il.  The same is true now, in that President Obama will have greater difficulty taking a tough stance towards North Korea, thanks in part to Bill Clinton’s visit and the pr stunt the North Korean dictator was able to pull off, according to Morris. (As a sidenote, Kim Jong-il cheated on his various agreements with the U.S. and has steadily built his nuclear program since the 1990’s while over 1 million of his people have starved to death. It is thought that the American tax dollars this sociopath received as a result of agreements with the U.S.–and which he received specifically for food–have gone instead to fund his nuclear program at full tilt).

Finally, Morris spoke of a poll he’d commissioned of Jewish Democrats who voted for Obama. The findings, which Morris recently chronicled on the opinion page of The New York Post, include the puzzling result that on the issue of Iran, Jewish Democrats agree by 67 percent to 8 percent that “if Iran gets nuclear weapons it will use them to destroy Israel,” yet they also, by 15 percent to 62 percent, disagree that “Israel should bomb Iran to stop them from developing nuclear weapons.”

I asked Morris how he might account for this seeming contradiction. He answered that he thinks Jewish Democrats are “confused” on this issue, but that they are slowly coming to the realization that Israel might truly be in peril with Iran galloping towards nuclear capability with Obama at the helm in the U.S.

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