Report: Bowl Cut Jr. has defense chief executed for falling asleep in a meeting

The stories that come out of North Korea - speaking here of the executions of those who in some small way displease Bowl Cut Jr. - are horrifying to the extent they can be believed. But I'm not gonna lie . . . sometimes they're downright hilarious. Maybe you just suspect that the "spies" who come up with this stuff are just punking the rest of us, which is why you can allow yourself to be amused by the creativity of the stories. The one about Kim having his ex-girlfriend executed in a stadium, which (we think) turned out not to be true, sounded like something Rogen and Franco could have come up with on their own.

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And now, could this really have happened?

North Korea’s equivalent of a defense minister has been executed by anti-aircraft gun for insubordination and treason — including for sleeping during a meeting where Kim Jong Un was speaking, South Korea’s intelligence agency said Wednesday. The report, if true, would starkly illustrate the brutal extent to which the young North Korean leader is going to consolidate power. General Hyon Yong Chol, held a variety of senior positions in North Korea’s military, most recently as chief of North Korea's People’s Armed Forces, the number two military position in the country. He was executed by firing squad at a Pyongyang military school in front of hundreds of people at the end of last month, officials from the National Intelligence Service told local reporters at a briefing in Seoul. An NIS spokesman confirmed to The Post that it believed Hyon had been executed. The NIS delivered a similar report to lawmakers in a closed-door parliamentary session earlier Wednesday, according to the South’s Yonhap News Agency. Hyon was seen dozing off during a military event and did not carry out Kim’s instructions, Han Ki-beom, the deputy director of the NIS, told the committee. YTN, Yonhap’s television arm, broadcast photos of Hyon, sitting at a meeting two seats away from Kim, with his eyes closed.

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Remember the one about the uncle who was supposedly put in an arena to be devoured by starving dogs? That one was called into question too, but who knows? Meanwhile, this same lunatic has apparently developed nuclear capabilities far beyond the ability of U.S. intelligence to keep on top of things:

North Korea’s test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile announced Saturday was not entirely a surprise. The rogue state makes its own version of the 1960s-era Soviet SS-N-6 and uses it as an upper stage in its multistage rockets. Last year a South Korean official confirmed that the North was modifying subs to carry the missile. In theory this means Pyongyang could mount a surprise nuclear attack, though the missile would require more testing to reliably deliver a warhead. The North could be lying or released doctored photographs, in this case of dictator Kim Jong Un standing aboard a ship and watching as a missile takes flight from beneath the sea. But if the test was successful—a South Korean official told Reuters Monday that the photos appear authentic—then it again shows the North’s engineering expertise is not to be taken lightly. The Kim regime has developed these threats faster than U.S. intelligence estimates said was possible.

At the moment we have a president who, like his party, doesn't really want to be bothered having to take external national security threats seriously. This is largely the result of an electorate that by 2008 was pretty well tired of that very same thing. If the same dictator who is deranged enough to execute a guy for falling asleep in a meeting develops the ability to strike the U.S. west coast with a nuclear missile, are you really so sure he won't do it that you think it's unnecessary to fully commit ourselves to an effective missile defense system? Hey, maybe all these reports are nonsense. Maybe he's really not a threat. You'd better hope so.

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