By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--August 11, 2017
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Senior American officials sent mixed signals on North Korea on Wednesday as President Trump’s “fire and fury” warning rattled allies and adversaries alike, a sign of his administration’s deep divisions as the outcast state once again threatened to wage nuclear war on the United States. The president’s advisers calibrated his dire warning with statements that, if not directly contradictory, emphasized different points. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson stressed diplomacy and reassured Americans that they could “sleep well at night,” while Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said North Korea risked “the end of its regime and the destruction of its people” if it did not “stand down.” North Korea gave no indication that it would do so. In a statement late Wednesday, the North Korean military dismissed Mr. Trump’s fire-and-fury warning on Tuesday as a “load of nonsense” and said only “absolute force” would work on someone so “bereft of reason.” The military threatened to “turn the U.S. mainland into the theater of a nuclear war” and added that any American strike on North Korean missile and nuclear targets would be “mercilessly repelled.”
The statement also said that the North Korean military would finalize a plan by mid-August to fire four midrange missiles into the waters off the Pacific island of Guam, a United States territory used as a strategic base, to create a “historic enveloping fire.” The spiral of fighting words left the Trump administration debating how to handle a standoff that has defied three presidents and only grown more ominous in recent weeks as North Korea successfully tested intercontinental ballistic missiles for the first time. Neither Mr. Tillerson nor Mr. Mattis had reviewed in advance Mr. Trump’s threat on Tuesday, when he said North Korea “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” And the dissonance in their own follow-up statements reflected the struggle inside the Trump administration.This one is truly a team effort in journalistic nonsense, with the AP reporting the story and the Times running it and writing the headline. Yet even the AP's own reporting doesn't come close to backing up the assertion made in the headline. For one thing, the story doesn't even cite anything going on inside the White House, not even offering anything based on the word of anonymous leakers. The story is totally dependent on public statements made by Trump, and the followup statements of key cabinet members like Tillerson and Mattis. And let's consider those. I don't know if the AP and the Times have been paying attention for the past several decades, but it's quite normal - especially during Republican administrations - for a president to make bold pronouncements on matters concerning foreign affairs, only to see their own Secretaries of State swoop in with statements that appear to throw cold water on what the president said. George Schultz did it to Ronald Reagan. Evil piece of garbage James A. Baker III did it to George Bush. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice did it to George W. Bush.
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