A Key in the Door

It was a made for television moment from two of the best showboats if not showmen in the business and it's kind of fortunate that Americans have so little use for history, our own as well as everyone else's, otherwise some of us might have thought we were being revisited by the ghost of Neville Chamberlain.     

"So you know Dennis Rodman, too?"

Savor the visual as something very few of us ever thought we might see but the devil is in the details in the text of the statement both men signed, or, rather is conspicuously absent from it. 

Four points, and none of them on either man's haircut though not for lack of trying I have to assume. The tricky part is #3, the "reaffirming" of the commitment to 'working toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.' 

For those who love the English language, 'reaffirming' is another word for 'we're saying it again like we did at the end of April.' Repeating it, which is all that has happened in the statement, costs no one anything, ever. 

But what's missing is a four-word phrase that belonged right there in that third point, "complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization."  When we speak of this, and we shall incessantly until the next bright shiny object in the news cycle comes along, we may be hard-pressed to articulate specifically what was accomplished. 

As a rule, I never praise the day before the evening arrives and I worry that if the past is indeed prologue, we may have some dark hours yet before us.
-bill kenny