Posted 5:23 PM by Floyd

Check out this weird editorial by Richard Reeves. Here are the money grafs:

DO not be shocked to read or see in a week, a year or five years, a declaration by Japan that it has decided, as a matter of self-defense, to build nuclear weapons and missile systems to deliver them. Or perhaps it will be Brazil. Or South Korea. Or Turkey. Or Egypt. Or Saudi Arabia. Or Mexico.

In just two years, the Bush administration has managed to undo the decades of work all over the world to try to prevent the proliferation of ``the bomb.'' In talking of pre-emptive strikes against ``evil'' regimes -- evil, of course, being in the red-white-and-blue eye of the beholder -- the United States is forcing other countries and their leaders, sane and insane, to re-evaluate long-ago decisions to trust a few rich nations that already had nuclear technology.

I haven't followed Reeves' career too closely, but I know he's been writing editorials for twenty years or more. And yet he cannot tell that if Japan or South Korea develops the bomb, it will be because North Korea is insane and belligerent and likes to launch rockets to show what they can hit. Even worse, he rejects the idea that there are any objective criteria by which a country can be judged to be evil. Hey dumbfuck, it's your job to persuade people that A is true, but not B. If you don't think that's possible, why are you risking a nasty case of carpal?

Maybe Reeves should hang it up and try something else.