By Al Kamen Wednesday, January 23, 2008; Page A17 J ay Lefkowitz-- President Bush's special envoy on North Korean human rights, or lack thereof -- sure created a fuss last week when he said the Commie regime of Kim Jong Il isn't serious about disarming and probably will still have nukes when a new president takes over, despite four years of six-party talks involving Washington, both Koreas, China, Japan and Russia.
Even worse, Lefkowitz, in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, called for "a new approach" to North Korea that would link human rights to security matters and, when asked if he was speaking on behalf of the Bush administration, said the policy is "under review right now."
Talk about off message! The State Department folks went ballistic.
Rather than rely on news accounts of Lefkowitz's heresy, we decided to read a transcript that had been posted on the State Department's Web site. We clicked and clicked to no avail. All we got was: "We're sorry. That page can't be found and may have been moved."
Unclear who airbrushed -- or as they say at Foggy Bottom, Trotskyed -- the transcript, although Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's sharp criticism yesterday of Lefkowitz gives a clue as to why they did the electronic white-out.
Lefkowitz "doesn't know what's going on in the six-party talks, and he certainly has no say on what American policy will be in the six-party talks," Rice told reporters traveling with her yesterday to Germany to discuss Iran's nuclear program.
Lefkowitz, she said, didn't speak for U.S. policy on that question and she doubted anyone in the talks would even recognize his name, according to the Associated Press.
Oh yes they would. The North Korean press yesterday blasted "hard-line" conservatives for trying to "stifle" North Korea. (Trust us, they're trying to do way more than that.) Meanwhile, buzz is that Lefkowitz told Bush two weeks ago that he wanted to resign, but Bush urged him to hang in there.
Despite the State Department's effort to delete Lefkowitz's views, we found the speech on the AEI Web site at http://www.aei.org/events/eventID.1635,filter.all/event_detail.asp.
Tick, Tick, Tick
There's been talk of late among the chattering class of growing Bloomberg Speculation Fatigue. Seems the calls of "Run, Mike, Run" for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's much-anticipated third-party presidential bid have been supplanted by "enough, already" complaints.
The unexpectedly chaotic nomination battles in both parties may be part of the problem. Bloomberg supporters would have been far happier if the parties' nominees had been picked by now.
Then Bloomberg, with his private-sector and mayoral experience, along with his moderate views, could step forward. "The rationale for his running," said election expert Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, applies "if you have candidates on the ballot who are on the wings or people without experience" in foreign policy or governance. Perhaps something like a Mike Huckabee- John Edwards contest.
"But it's entirely possible we're not going to know the candidates until it's too late" for Bloomberg to use that rationale, Ornstein said. It's looking now as though the Republicans and maybe even the Democrats may go all the way to the conventions in August before choosing a nominee.
If Bloomberg were to run, he would have to gather enough petitions to get his name on the state ballots. Texas and several other states allow you to start getting petitions on March 5. Bloomberg, given his bottomless pockets, would have enough money to begin later than most candidates, but he'd have to be on state ballots by around the end of April, Ornstein noted.
The perceived wisdom is that Bloomberg will not run unless he thinks he has a serious chance of winning. In some matchups he might. In a John McCain- Barack Obama or a McCain- Hillary Clinton race, it's most unlikely.
While Bloomberg continues playing Hamlet, some people close to him think they may have picked up clues that he will run.
"He used to say he's a 5-foot-6-inch Jew," said former New York mayor Ed Koch, "and now he says he is 5-foot-7 -- though he continues to be Jewish."
If he adds one more inch . . .
The Primary Problem
Meanwhile, there are moves afoot on the Hill to try to do something about the expensive and ever-earlier primary lunacy.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), backed by Sen. Lamar! Alexander (Tenn.), a former GOP presidential candidate, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), a former Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidate, introduced a bill to move the primaries from January to March. The measure would keep Iowa and New Hampshire in the lead but then would shift to four regional primaries, ending in early June.
There's a question as to whether the Constitution bars Congress from enacting such legislation, but supporters say they've got an important 1981 article by a former law professor when the inevitable legal challenge reaches the Supreme Court.
"Congress must have at least authority to specify the dates of primaries," wrote the professor, now Justice Antonin Scalia.
So now if we don't like the way the primaries are conducted, we can blame Congress.
By REUTERS Published: January 23, 2008 Filed at 5:31 a.m. ET
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea marked the anniversary on Wednesday of one of its rare Cold War victories over the United States by saying a U.S. spy ship it seized 40 years ago served as a lesson to show it can repel an invasion.
It is the paranoid state's latest dig at its long-time foe and which it still labels as an arch enemy despite Washington's pledge to provide aid and better diplomatic standing to Pyongyang in a disarmament deal.
"(The Pueblo) is historical evidence proving before the whole world the victory of the DPRK (North Korea) in the confrontation with the U.S. to protect the national sovereignty and dignity," the North's state media quoted an official as saying on the anniversary of the January 23, 1968 capture of the USS Pueblo.
The cash-strapped North, whose million-man army needs to ration its little fuel just to keep its jeeps, planes and tanks running, turned the Pueblo into a tourist attraction in Pyongyang several years ago to attract foreign currency.
"If the U.S. imperialists persistently pursue their hostile policy towards the DPRK and their design to invade it, they will suffer a more shameful defeat," it quoted a chief of an anti-imperialist group as saying.
North Korean vessels, including speedy submarine chasers, opened fire on the Pueblo and eventually captured it. The United States said its ship was in international waters at the time.
The Pueblo's surviving 82 crew members were held for months in a standoff that added further damage to a Lyndon Johnson administration that was already growing increasingly unpopular at the height of the Vietnam War.
U.S. negotiators apologized to North Korea to win the crews' release from brutal prison camps and the North kept control of the spy ship. The United States later retracted the apology.
North Korea, which tested a nuclear device in October 2006, has said it built atomic weapons to deter an invasion.
Even though the North is one of the world's most militarized states, its conventional forces are no match for a far superior U.S. military, analysts said.
U.S. officials have repeatedly said they have no plans to attack the country and entered into international talks to rid the North of its nuclear weaponry and fissile material.
Under a deal the North reached with regional powers including the United States, it can receive aid and removal from a U.S. terrorism blacklist if it starts to take apart its nuclear arms plant and give a full accounting of its atomic arms program.
North Korea, which has started to roll back its Yongbyon nuclear plant, appears to have met the legal criteria to be taken off the terrorism list but the removal depends on it making headway on the nuclear deal, a U.S. official said on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)
