The problem with the Bush campaign’s detachment from reality — Iraq is going great, the president’s record on jobs isn’t an abysmal failure, etc. — is not just that it deceives voters. A bigger problem is that it appears to be a contagious condition.
The ultra-conservative Washington Times, owned by the infamous Rev. Sun Myung Moon, ran an editorial yesterday blasting John Kerry’s position on North Korea, calling it “revisionism.” It was the usual claptrap until the Times editors noted a fascinating development.
In August 1998 North Korea test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile that hit Alaska.
The point of the comment seemed to be that Clinton didn’t sufficiently respond the burgeoning crisis on the peninsula. Now, I consider myself fairly well-informed and it seems to me that if an enemy of the United States fired an intercontinental ballistic missile at our country and actually hit us, that’d be a fairly significant development. Indeed, I’d probably remember this happening, if it had occurred outside the imagination of crazed “newspaper” editorial writers.
What did happen in August 1998? Matt Yglesias pointed out the facts that the Washington Times got completely wrong.
On 31 August 1998, North Korea attempted to place a small satellite into orbit. The satellite was carried on board a Taep’o-dong rocket. The first stage of the Taep’o-dong splashed down in the Sea of Japan roughly 115km southeast of Vladivostok, Russia. The second stage is reported to have flown over the main Japanese island of Honshu and landed roughly 330km away from the Japanese port city of Hachinohe after flying for approximately 1,320km. A solid fuel third stage is believed to have carried a small satellite and was probably destroyed before reaching orbit.
The Washington Times considers this an example of North Korea hitting the United States with an ICBM? No wonder the paper’s editorial board likes Bush so much; they live in the same fantasy world.