It’s a very bad think to speak evil of the dead. Yet in the case of Detestable North Korean Tyrant, Kim Jong IL, there is a factual limit to the non-derogatory things I can say. Just this weekend, he did the people of his long-suffering and benighted nation a serious favor. That’s it. I’m out of pleasantries for the funeral oration. Now it’s on to the fulsome and scurvy truth.

Kim the Tyrant dies of a heart attack at the age of 70. This is according to KNCA the accurate, unbiased and believable North Korean official news agency. If the world were a more condign and just place, he would have passed from malnutrition like a vast number of the people he misruled for seventeen years.

Having read several estimates of just how many died from relying on the beneficent, Marxian, North Korean State for their nutritional needs, I can only conclude that the North Korean society and government are too screwed up and dishonest to ever derive an accurate point estimate. The official North Korean (low-ball) estimates were approximately 45,000 per year. This would put them about on a par with the number of obesity deaths in a developed, democratic nation.

A South Korean doctoral student wrote his Ph. D. on the subject. South Korean Economist, Dr. Suk Lee, puts the death toll at 660,000. Several exile groups place the calamity in the range of 1 million starvations per year in the mid-to-late 1990’s. On the high end of the range, this famine could have claimed three million lives.

The carnage only stopped when the US, China and S. Korea began feeding North Korea. In return for which, we get continued threats, deranged rants, acts of international sabotage against our nation and a general lack of gratitude that confounds my ability to compare it to anything. They have quite literally bitten the hand that feeds them to the point where Americans of all political persuasions have valid gravamen to detest the current government of North Korea. They were once dubbed by a US State Department Worker as “The Soprano State” for reasons detailed below.

The illegal items like cigarettes, drugs, music & video CD’s and DVD’s, imposter designer clothing and counterfeit money come in on container ships, and pass through customs with a quick bribe to an underpaid, overworked customs officer by a Korean Diplomat, then quickly get distributed through the network of criminal gangs, each seeking their piece of the pie….. For most of the year Kim Jong sends out his troops to collect the bellflowers in bloom, (white bellflowers) or poppies, the vital feedstock for opium and heroin processing. The collected bellflowers are brought back to Reamong Pharmaceutical, the Korean owned government controlled company for processing into drugs to ship overseas…

(HT: Frank Wolf, Yahoo News)

So now a vile criminal is dead. The North Koreans test-fired two short range missiles as a fitting tribute to their former “Dear Leader.” KNCA reports that despite the fact that millions of North Koreans are “engulfed in indescribable sadness” Kim Jong-un, the younger son of the deranged tyrant, has emerged as the “great successor.”

Fellow Red-Stater, Francis Cianfrocco, noted the following.

You’d think an adroit president of the United States would be able to influence and direct this situation to good advantage. Too bad we have the president we have. He’s probably going to give a speech in which he expresses concern for the humanitarian dimensions of the situation, and calls for all the people of the Korean Peninsula to settle the situation together, and rally behind their leaders. Translated, that means “I got nothin’.”

I’m willing to hope this isn’t the case. Like a famous wit once said of 2nd marriages, this may be a triumph of hope over experience given the man we have in The White House. However, there are isolated pockets of competent decision-making that have survived three years of the Obama Presidency. Certainly, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta and others will recognize the conjunction of necessity and opportunity that Kim Jon Il’s blessed demise presents here.

My best-case scenario for what happens next consists of a slow-motion surrender of the North Korean state to reality. We treat them well and feed their starving population, while a working group of Chinese, Russian and S. Korean officials gradually takes down the security apparatus and hopelessly incompetent North Korean bureaucracy. Japan and The United States would observe and help out without putting a stick into anyone’s eye by aggressively taking a lead role.

This would require a high degree of American moral suasion and diplomatic leadership to pull off. Let’s all hope we still have some of either still left.