Last week it was announced that President Trump had accepted an invitation from North Korea’s Kim Jong-un to meet in the near future. When one considers the threat posed by the North Korean despot, the opportunity to diffuse that threat has to be taken. That is one attribute of a leader: Charting previously uncharted courses by taking risks where the rewards can be great.
Failed leaders fail to take action: the status quo is their course of action. Bold men, make bold moves. Trump’s acceptance of the invitation is one such bold move.
Reasonable people are hoping for a positive outcome, while unreasonable people, blinded by their hate for the president have gone off the deep end. That brings us to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. Last week Ms. Maddow was in a tizzy:
“Kim Jong-un makes a request, you want to meet? You might think like another president in this circumstance, you can imagine a president asking himself or herself, why has no other American president ever agreed to do is this? Why has no sitting American president ever met with a leader from North Korea? Why has that never happened in all the decades North Korea has existed as a nation? Why hasn`t any other president ever done – should I take this to mean this might be a particularly risky or even unwise move? … I think a lot of people probably suspect tonight those are not the kinds of questions that this president asked himself before agreeing to this meeting. But this is the president we have and he said yes to North Korea.”
One could reasonably question this move:  What are the desired goals to be achieved, the points of discussion to be covered? Why the suddenness of the decision or any of several aspects of the announcement? (Maddow does cover some of that later). But to wrongfully go into high dudgeon over the fact that this is an “unprecedented move” betrays Maddow as one who attacks Trump because, well, because he is Trump.
Maddow needs to be corrected: This is not the first time in history that a president has chosen to break with tradition by meeting with a cruel and vile despot of an isolated country. Indeed, that action was taken in the prior administration, when President Obama visited Kim Jong Fidel in Cuba.
Some will claim there is no comparison between the two nations, North Korea and Cuba. Those that say that are uninformed, sympathetic to the cause or wear their Che shirts with prideful ignorance. Humberto Fontova, a syndicated columnist and former resident of Cuba, has covered this subject well for many years:
“Castro jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror, murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six and came closest of anyone in history to starting a worldwide nuclear war. In the above process he converted a nation with a higher per-capita income than half of Europe and a huge influx of immigrants into one that repels Haitians and boasts the highest suicide rate in the hemisphere.”
If a news analyst were to be fair and objective, one would expect that Obama’s trip to Cuba would also have been questioned. But we are talking about MSNBC and Rachel Maddow. Here is how MSNBC described Obama’s announcement:
“In the not-too-distant past, the very idea of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba seemed fanciful. The suggestion that a sitting American president would set foot on Cuban soil as part of a diplomatic trip was almost impossible to imagine.
“And yet, here we are. Barack Obama will become the first sitting American president to visit Cuba in nearly 90 years, in what would be a crucial turning point between the Cold War rivals that recently shed their decades-old hostilities.
“Obama will visit the communist island nation in March, he said in a tweet.”
In a tweet? One has to laugh at that since Trump has been widely vilified for his use of that vehicle for any  announcement, but I digress.   From the transcript of the Rachel Maddow show of March 21, 2016:
“There`s maybe a reason that it took 50 years to get this done. But when the Castro brothers die and when Cuba opens and becomes a new iteration of itself, no longer trapped in the politics of the 1950s and before, nobody knows who will get to write the history of this moment in  Cuban history, but in American history, we know, that President Barack Obama will be forever the American leader who got done what every other Democrat since Jack Kennedy tried and failed to do. He got it done. (BAND PLAYING STAR SPANGLED BANNER)”
Such a patriotic flare there at the end, closing the segment with the national anthem: Obama the hero. The patriot, achieving what no other president was capable.*   It has become an unfortunate state of affairs that our major news networks, as well as more minor cable networks, are no longer able to report the news for what it is, but must cast the news colored by the light of their political persuasion.
Is Maddow’s reaction to Trump in Korea tainted by her hatred of Trump? Or is her reaction to Obama in Cuba a result of her adulation of Obama?
In his book “Flim Flam Man,” former  Benicia Herald columnist Jim Pugh stated:
“Every president in the last 40 years has simply thrown (Kim Jong Un) a bone when he puffed up his chest and threatened war. It is a duck and dodge strategy that has been used by four presidents and doesn’t appear likely to change soon.”
Let’s hope that Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong-Un will be the change in course that is needed and if it is, then Trump haters like Maddow will really be driven crazy.

Dennis Lund is a mechanical engineer who lived in Benicia for more than 20 years. This piece originally ran on The American Thinker.

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