One of the nice things about the postwar Pax Americana is that you could at least rely on us to do the easy evil things and eschew the difficult good ones. Depose the elected leader and prop up the strongman, make the world safe for BP, bomb anything that complained, prolong the war to avoid being the party that lost it, and pretend comeuppance could be endlessly deferred, like the draft notices of the executive branch. There was a sensibility in our callowness.
All that went out the window when we installed the chemical-peeled meringue at 1600... We wanted regime change and we got it, toppling decades of technocratic low-effort contempt for human life and and replacing it with a senile authoritarian who, in any just universe, would be getting escorted out of Denny's by the police for trying to put the hostess' moons over his hammy.
Jeb Lund at
Esquire on the US and North Korea.