Fox News recently added another “news” program to their lineup, The Specialists. I’ve never watched it. It’s hosted by the cloddish one from Fox & Friends, Eric Bolling, and two young women I’ve never heard of before, Katherine Timpf and Eboni Williams. None of them have any significant expertise; Bolling is an ex-baseball player, Timpf is a comedian, and Williams is the best qualified of the bunch, with a law degree, and that’s it. This is just a group of opinionated people with opinions, and they get their very own news show on Fox — I think you could probably get a better group of people by going down to a local bar and hiring whatever table is having the loudest argument.
But here’s the real problem: these bozos are chattering about what to do about North Korea, and Bolling has ideas
.
Bolling suggested that any
threatof military action on the Korean peninsula will prompt China to take action for fear that millions of refugees will cripple the Chinese economy.
No one else is going to help them out,Bolling offered, adding the incentive will be even greater if South Korea builds afreaking wallso all North Korean refugees are forced to flee to China.
Build a wall? Why is that a solution Trumpkins always suggest? As you probably know, there is already the Korean Demilitarized Zone in place, a 250km guarded barrier 4km wide stretching across the entire Korean peninsula, backed by military forces on both sides. Travel between the two countries is already tightly controlled.
But think about this plan: he wants to terrorize the civilian population of North Korea into becoming a weapon used against China. Already awful, you might say, but how does he plan to freak out North Korean civilians?
The Fox News host later said the United States should consider an attack on the DPRK.
Thirty minutes is the lead time between firing that missile in North Korea and Los Angeles,Bolling said.Are you willing to risk Los Angeles?
It may be time for a preemptive strike,he added.
I forgot the other thing Trumpkins suggest: bombs. Walls and bombs. That’s how we’ll solve all of our problems.
I would ask Bolling “are you willing to risk Seoul?”, if I didn’t already suspect he’d cheerfully say “yes!” 25 million people live in the Seoul metropolitan area, and stacked up on the other side of the DMZ is the DPRK artillery, all within range and pointed directly at the city. Where are those refugees going to scurry? How can he be so cavalier about triggering destruction and death and misery to innocents?
And what are we going to do about a news organization that willfully sows dangerous misinformation? Point and laugh, I guess, and let everyone know that they’re a deluded idiot if you watch Fox News.
Like our president.
Ummmm . . . they are not him, and they are not white?
One might reasonably ask what the hell the Korean situation has to do with these people. It’s rather telling that the issue is phrased as “what should WE do?” – as if it’s their problem, rather than the problem of the Koreans themselves.
“What should WE do?”, where the answer is always “Kill them.”
It is scary when such clueless people are talking about such a dangerous situation.
I am by no means an expert on south east asia geopolitics and even i know that if you attack North Korea you also attack China.
NK is the dead beat brother of China. China worries about NK and even wants to change them, but if you attack NK China will defend them.
Not to forget that NK was a highly developed nation before sanctions destroyed their economy, building rockets for half the world, and is still extremely militarized with nuclear capabilities. Any war would be a horrible, bloody and costly affair.
We should throw the worlds largest BBQ right along the DMZ when the wind is blowing North. They’ll be defecting in droves. ;)
The DMZ is just a very short, very wide wall. So now we’re supposed to build a structure on it that would provide visual cover for potential infiltrators while making every soldier manning it a better target? Yeah, right.
Some day, I’d like to see the first question asked of every military-affairs commentator be something like “May I see your DD-214, please?”… along with a link to it on the associated website (redacting the personal information). It’s not that those with no military experience shouldn’t comment on military affairs — it’s that it should be clear to everyone when those making such comments don’t, and that there’s usually something wrong when an entire panel/conversation is devoid of veterans. For some topics, a majority of nonveteran commentators is appropriate or even preferable, but it’s almost never appropriate for veterans to be entirely absent. Bluntly, until you’ve been the one making decisions to send people into harm’s way, there are aspects that you won’t understand.
So our response to the state murder of one of our citizens should be to kill tens of millions? OK….
Some other countries that regularly kill their own citizens along with other country’s:
Russia
Saudi Arabia
The Philippines
Turkey
And yet our alleged president is great friends with their leaders. Why is that?
Oh, yeah, I forgot to add another country to the list: the US.
Also, someone should tell that idiot that most refugees who make it out of NK already do so by way of China.
That the situation exists at all is a result of US imperialist geopolitical meddling. The Koreans ought to be saying “stop ‘helping’ us, please!”
Disclaimer: I have never been in the military. I drew a high enough number is the first draft lottery (held Dec. 1969) that I *didn’t* get drafted during the tail end of the Viet Nam War.
I am categorically *not* suggesting a military strike on North Korea. However, if one was done, I would expect the first wave of the strike be one to take out as much of the NK artillery within range of the SK border as possible in order to minimize the damage from the ensuing artillery strike to SK to the extent possible. (People with actual military experience are welcome to point out any flaws in this as I’m sure there are a fair number.)
As for Chinese support for NK…from what I’ve read, they consider NK to be a buffer zone to keep a modern, vibrant–albeit flawed (aren’t we all?)–Western-oriented country away from their border. Pretty much the same reasons the Russians are so nervous about the expansion of the EU and NATO into state directly bordering on them.
DON’T call them “Trumpkins!” Trumpkin is a character in CS Lewis’ Narnia book Prince Caspian, and he is everything Trumpies are not: reliable, good-hearted, sensible, loyal, humble, and kind.
Call them “Trumpies”. Then, when they have sex, it’s “Trumpie-rumpie-pumpie”.
#11 handsomemrtoad: seconded.
But you may find readers of this blog are not big fans of C.S. Lewis…
10 (whheydt): Targeting the enemy’s artillery first is a sensible suggestion… but in practice, the only reasonably effective way to target an enemy’s artillery is counterbattery fire — the equivalent of aiming suppressive small-arms fire at the muzzle flash. A DPRK “kamikaze” barrage (fire as many rounds as possible from each tube, regardless of the risk of losing the tubes to counterbattery fire) that would allow relatively modern, mechanically loaded artillery to get off between 6 and 10 rounds before the first counterbattery rounds landed in return. Needless to say, that’s not very good for the soft targets — especially CIVILIAN soft targets — on the end of the DPRK’s initial barrage. And even excellent counterbattery fire doesn’t get every tube, let alone those that didn’t fire in the first wave and/or are themselves hardened and/or were mobile artillery that moved… and the DPRK has a LOT of very-good-for-the-1980s Soviet-designed/built artillery. And, more ominously, multiple rocket launchers (generically “Katyushas”) that can definitely ruin a target’s day.
Now add in that parts of Seoul are within range of “medium” artillery and MRLs, and you’ll see why amateur analysts Over Here who haven’t walked the ground Over There are part of the problem. I may have been a Zoomie myself, but I spent several years with A-10s and thus observed a heckuva lot about this sort of thing… including a healthy disrespect for the purely-tactical value of satellite and air reconaissance against an opponent who is expecting it.
The play by play guys during a Fox Sports baseball broadcast on the weekend had to shill for The Specialists, with Timpf and Williams in the booth with them for a half inning. I wonder what other evil things they have to do to keep their jobs.
What a Maroon, living up to the ‘nym wrote:
Well, that was the U.S.’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attack, that left far more dead, wounded or displaced than the actual attack did, and even included a country that had nothing to do with the attack. This seems to be the usual mode of the U.S., as far as I can tell.