(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Well, if the president* is going to insist on copping Elton John lyrics as part of a more belligerent American foreign policy, particularly in regards to North Korea, you can certainly find more appropriate ones than referring to Kim Jong-un as “Rocket Man” before the United Nations General Assembly. For example:

Once a fool had a good part in the play

If it's so would I still be here today

It's quite peculiar in a funny sort of way

They think it's very funny everything I say

Get a load of him, he's so insane

And the great thing is that this particular lyric can be applied by each of the two madmen to the other madman across the water. This is really not the way I’d like to hear history rhyme, however.

The Kims of North Korea have produced a basket case full of spooky automatons, an authoritarian hermit state of which we know very little. (And blessings be on Evan Osnos for trying so brilliantly to enlighten us just a little in The New Yorker.) That being said, I’m not entirely sure that this is the way to go.

“If it [the US] forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

(Let us not believe for a moment that the president* is the only bellicose American at the UN. On Monday, Nikki Haley, the UN ambassador and reputedly one of the Sensible Ones, said that we had “exhausted” diplomatic options and that she was willing to hand the whole thing over to the Department of Defense.)

Remember that you’re dealing with a population that knows very little about the outside world except what the government tells it about the outside world, and, because of that, a population that firmly believes the United States is always one step away from annihilating it and has been since the middle of the last century. Now, before god and the world, here’s an American president saying that for real. The government propaganda apparatus doesn’t even need to make anything up this time around.

Getty Images

The speech was 41 minutes long, at least half of which were completely appalling. The Totally Destroy moment was probably the noisiest of the latter group. But there were also the minutes in which he threw his predecessor under the bus. The nuclear agreement with Iran, of which the UN approved and was a critical part, is “an embarrassment to the United States,” which is not a phrase that this particular president ought to throw around with such promiscuous abandon. He took a drive-by shot at Venezuela, which has enough to worry about without his glib contempt. He complained about the percentage that the United States pays off the UN budget. He kept intoning the phrase “Radical Islamic Terrorism,” and must have been very disappointed when the delegation from the UAE didn’t disappear entirely when he spoke the magic words.

And then there was this passage, which, given what’s going on between Robert Mueller and the people who worked to get him elected, was pretty damn entertaining.

“We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, values or systems of government. But we do expect all nations to uphold their core sovereignty and respect the interests of their own people and rights of every other sovereign nation. This is the beautiful vision of this institution and the foundation for cooperation and success.”

Call me a cynic, but I don’t think the Russian ratfcking that benefitted his campaign in so many ways, some of which we’re only discovering now, showed much respect for America’s “core sovereignty.” Did he mention Russia in his speech? You’re joking, right?

The speech was long, dumb, and insulting, which I guess is what it was meant to be. Now, in his mind, he’s living entirely at one of his campaign rallies. He hears cheering where there is no audience, and he doesn’t seem to realize that Richard Nixon’s “Madman Theory” only works if one side or the other is actually sane. I was just thinking: He wants this big Dear Leader Parade next Fourth of July. If he gets it, advanced weaponry of all kinds, and that he nominally controls as commander-in-chief, will roll down Pennsylvania Avenue past the headquarters of every institution of government that possibly could hold him to account, including FBI headquarters, the federal courthouse, and the Senate side of the Capitol.

You don't think ... nah, that's crazy talk.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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