This is getting more bizarre by the second. Dennis Rodman appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos earlier this morning to do his first public interview since returning from North Korea. What?
He had a message, too (one which the State Department, for the record, has no interest in):
“He wants Obama to do one thing: Call him. He said, ‘If you can, Dennis – I don’t want [to] do war. I don’t want to do war.’ He said that to me.”
Watch as Stephanopoulos asks Rodman if he has a “responsibility” to ask the leader of North Korea about his human rights record. Because Rodman’s the one we want doing that, huh. More out of The Worm:
“[Kim] loves basketball. And I said the same thing, I said, ‘Obama loves basketball.’ Let’s start there.”
The British never will be able to broach peace with North Korea because they don’t get basketball. Just remember that.
Rodman left Pyongyang on Friday, but not before giving this memorable quote to Xinhua:
Kim “is like his grandfather and his father, who are great leaders, he is an awesome kid, very honest and loves his wife so much.”
An awesome kid. How many North Korean scholars are crying into their pillows, spiteful that history will forever remember Rodman as the first American to meet Kim Jong-un since his ascension to power?
What we still have to sort out is what Kim and co. believe they gain out of allowing him in the country — and, for that matter, VICE, which produced one of the more self-aggrandizing and unflattering “documentaries” on the country in 2006. Maybe young Kim, just 30 (or so) years old, really just yearned for a friend. He’s got a pretty good one now in a fellow human being who perceives himself as equally misunderstood.
Dennis Rodman: Kim Jong Un Wants President Obama to ‘Call Him’ (ABC News)
Anne-Marie Brady has written a monography on how the CCP has “used foreigners” — in particular foreign visitors during the Mao era — to propagate its message and generally to project a positive image of itself in the world. At the time, the CCP focused on intellectuals like Sartre and journalists, showing a Chinese distinctive predilection for the literati. Koreans, which are the coolest, most awesome people in the world, went for the cool-slash-wierd basketball player with green hair.