“Kim Jong the Third”
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008In the interest of balance, I should point out that Christopher Hitchens’ remembrance of Jesse Helms is the gold standard the MSM should have followed. The anecdote about Helms referring to the North Korean dictator as “Kim Jong the Second,” and then, after his aides tried to forestall such errors in the future by providing him with a phonetic spelling, denouncing someone called “Kim Jong the Third,” is the sort of thing that made Hitchens necessary reading in the first place. Indeed, a lot of the material comes from an old Nation column that appears to be stuck behind his old mag’s pay-per-archive firewall — but that’s okay! Whatever he needs to do to regain his old form (and knock off these sorts of things) is fine by me.