Sara(h) Smiles, Part 15: In Her Hole

I wasn’t expecting everyone on whose door I tapped yesterday to be gracious about their Thanksgiving being interrupted, but when I explained that I was there on behalf of Sarah’s imminent presidential candidacy, nearly everyone changed his or her tune, and invited me in for at least a turkey wing and some stuffing. A couple of people, though, seized the opportunity to make a big deal of Sarah’s having seemingly forgotten the other night that it’s the South Koreans who are our allies, and not the North. As usual, they seemed to view this gaffe as further evidence of Our Gal’s being a dimwit, but if they’d examined a transcript of her interview more closely, they’d have seen clear evidence not only of a normal IQ, but even a higher-than-average one, as you'd expect in someone with a college degree and everything. "This,” she asserted about the whole Korea mess, “is stemming from, I think, a greater problem when we're all sitting around asking, 'Oh no, what are we going to do,' and we're not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do."

That, I submit, is brilliant use of the language — sanction being the one word in English that means essentially opposite things (generally, condone as a verb and penalty as a noun). So was Sarah advocating that we support North Korea’s having attacked South Korean civilians on Tuesday, allegedly in retaliation for the South Korean navy’s firing into North Korean territorial waters during military exercises, or penalize them?

Ambiguity is every world leader’s ace in the hole, and Sarah’s clearly got a king, a queen, and a much livelier intellect than many give her credit for in her hole.

And now, by exclusive arrangement with the Department of State, it can be revealed: She might have let the cat out of the bag, but she didn't have her facts skewed. North Korea really is our ally, and all the lamestreamers ridiculing her can just, as feisty Willow might put it, STFU.

It wasn’t always thus, of course. Indeed, in the two decades immediately following the conclusion of the Korean, uh, conflict — North Korea was indeed very much in America’s diplomatic doghouse. But as Japan began to soar economically in the mid-1970s with the introduction of the Datsun 240Z, 260Z and even 280Z, and Casio digital wristwatches, it secretly asked America for help staying ahead of South Korea. Confident that no one would believe us capable of such a thing, since we have never in our history backed a tyrannical lunatic, the CIA worked to help Kim Jong-Il consolidate his power within the Korean Workers’ Party, and American advertising and public relations firms were secretly drafted to sell to the North Korean public his self-elevation to the status of Dear Leader.

It all worked far better than anyone could have imagined. North Korean saber-rattling — and testing of nuclear weapons — has until very recently kept South Korea too nervous to mount an effective challenge to the Japanese, who rewarded us by sending us Ichiro Suzuki and introducing sushi and Casio keyboards in North America. For that, all Americans should be thankful, for no one who has ever tasted good sushi will deny that it is the most delicious food known to man, and you could count the number of hit records produced in the West since 1982 on which Casio keyboards have not played a vital role on the toes of one of Kim Jong-Il’s notoriously tiny feet, which some believe to be webbed; no photographs are known to exist.

The South Koreans tried to fight back, of course, with Samsung electronics and kimchi, a traditional fermented vegetable side dish, but it was far too spicy for the average American palate, and after decades of enjoying Yamaha and Mitsubishi products, Americans were loath to buy televisions, laptop computers, and MP3 players from companies that didn’t also manufacture motorcycles, in the one case, and automobiles, in the other.

Underestimate Sarah Palin at your own peril!