North Korea
President Donald Trump was compared to another murderous world dictator on Thursday night as MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews suggested Trump is just like former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un since Trump and Kim “love the parades” where they can serve as the star alongside military demonstrations.
The New York Times found itself in hot water Tuesday and Wednesday after it dabbled in some false or fake news, falling for a well-known fake Twitter account posing as the official feed for the North Korea government. In a story about the murderous regime’s startling Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), a piece from The Times by Choe Sang-Hun claimed: “On Twitter early Wednesday, the North Korean government belittled the joint exercise as ‘demonstrating near total ignorance of ballistic science.’”
Wednesday on Good Morning America, an ABC journalist casually compared our president to a tyrannical dictator of a totalitarian state, and no one batted an eye. The extreme comment came after ABC reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile this past weekend, that had the capabilities of reaching American soil.
Thursday, June 22, was marked, sadly, by the funeral services for American student Otto Warmbier following his captivity in North Korea. While others mourned the loss of this young man’s life at the hands of the tyrannical communist regime, MSNBC’s Morning Joe opted for a different route. How you ask? Why, by comparing President Trump to North Korea, of course! In an exchange with co-host Mika Brzezinski, Random House editor Jon Meacham compared the actions of Donald Trump at an Iowa rally to, “regimes like North Korea, where the dear leader speaks and we’re all supposed to salute.”
We may never know what brutal torture and malign neglect American student Otto Warmbier suffered at the hands of North Korea's dictatorship before losing his life this week at the age of 22. But it wasn't the first time the free-spirited Ohio native died. More than a year before succumbing to the unknown illness or injury that left him in a coma thousands of miles away from home, Otto Warmbier's own countrymen murdered his reputation. His character. His humanity.
Otto Warmbier, the 22-year-old student from Wyoming, Ohio and the University of Virginia who was returned to his family in a coma last week after being imprisoned in North Korea for over a year, died on Monday. Tuesday morning, the Associated Press and "experts" it consulted somehow found the communist nation's treatment of Warmbier "one of the more perplexing and heart-rending developments in North Korea's long, antagonistic standoff with its neighbors and Washington." A reading of AP's "analysis" indicates that it's fair to claim that restrictions North Korea has placed on the wire service in return for its presence there have pervasively affected the credibility of all of its reporting from and even about that country.
Tragic news broke Monday evening when the family of Otto Warmbier, the American college student taken by North Korea and returned in a coma, put out a statement that their son passed had away earlier that afternoon. “Unfortunately, the awful torturous mistreatment our son received at the hands of the North Koreans ensured that no other outcome was possible beyond the sad one we experienced today,” the statement said. When Otto was first detained by the Communist regime, multiple outlets mocked his arrest and impending doom.
After the network evening newscasts downplayed or ignored the father of freed North Korea hostage Otto Warmbier criticizing the Obama administration’s failure to bring his severely injured son home, on Friday’s NBC Today, correspondent Andrea Mitchell actually devoted a full report to the topic. However, her focus was on parroting excuses from former Obama officials.
Americans were appalled Thursday to learn the medical condition North Korea left American Otto Warmbier in while he was in their custody. In a press conference, his father, Fred Warmbier, had stark criticism for the Obama administration. “Do I think the past administration could have done more? I think the results speak for themselves,” he said. And during their evening broadcasts, ABC and CBS ignored his comments while NBC downplayed them.
During a 10 a.m. press conference on Thursday, Fred Warmbier, the father of freed North Korean hostage Otto Warmbier, thanked the Trump administration for aiding in the release of his son while voicing his displease with the Obama administration’s handling of the situation. In the coverage on MSNBC that followed, Warmbier’s comments were dismissed as “rhetoric” from “someone who isn’t necessarily politically sophisticated.”
In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote "An Essay on the Principle of Population." He predicted that mankind's birthrate would outstrip our ability to grow food and would lead to mass starvation. Malthus' wrong predictions did not deter Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich from making a similar prediction.
More terrible news broke out of North Korea overnight where the murderous regime detained another American on questionable charges. Every one of the Big Three Networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) reported on the development Monday morning. Sadly both CBS and NBC decided to move on from the story come evening. For CBS Evening News, they decided it wasn’t worth the time. But they did find time for a report highlighting anti-U.S. protests.