Trump-- with help from Giuliani and Barr-- has been asking foreign leaders to attack Biden. Kim Jung Un to the rescue! Yesterday, Jack Kim, reporting from Seoul for Reuters, wrote that North Korea’s state media attacked Biden for slandering its leader, calling Status Quo Joe "a rabid dog" and insinuating he should be killed, which is how Kim gets rid of his own critics.
The official KCNA news agency did not say how Biden had insulted the North’s leader, Kim Jong Un, but the 2020 presidential hopeful has been critical of U.S. President Donald Trump’s policy, saying he was coddling a murderous dictator.Misspelling Biden’s name, KCNA said the former vice president was showing signs of “the final stage of dementia,” and the “time has come for him to depart his life.”In a commentary, it said, “Such a guy had the temerity to dare slander the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK,” using the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.“It was the last-ditch efforts of the rabid dog expediting his death,” KCNA said. “Rabid dogs like Baiden (sic) can hurt lots of people if they are allowed to run about. They must be beaten to death with a stick, before it is too late.”In contrast, the North has credited a “close personal relationship” between Kim and Trump for saving ties between their countries from a destructive pattern of hostility. The leaders have met three times to discuss improving ties and ending the North’s nuclear weapons program.“It’s becoming more and more obvious that repugnant dictators, as well as those who admire and ‘love’ them, find Joe Biden threatening,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Biden’s presidential campaign.“That’s because he’d restore American leadership in the world on day one by putting our security, interests, and values at the heart of our foreign policy.”North Korea is known for colorful attacks on foreign leaders, with propaganda posters believed to be from the country once describing Trump himself as a “mad dog.” Pyongyang also denounced Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton as a “war maniac” and “human scum.”Trump backed a previous personal attack on Biden by the North and dismissed criticism that he was siding with a foreign dictator over a fellow American.In May, North Korea had called Biden “an imbecile” for criticizing its leader.
While Trump's North Korean ally was sending out that crazy press release, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanocitch, was testifying in the impeachment hearing. Trump-- who claims he isn't watching the hearing tweeted-- in an attempt at witness tampering:Elise Viebeck, reporting for the Washington Post took a look at Trumpist misogyny in regard to Yovanovitch today. She wrote that during the pivotal phone call Trump smeared her like this to the new Ukrainian president: "The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news."
Trump then made an ominous prediction as he pressured Zelensky for investigations of his political rivals. “She’s going to go through some things,” he said of the ambassador.As a leading female diplomat, a political target of the president’s allies and a figure at the center of the Ukraine drama, Yovanovitch has crucial knowledge to impart when she testifies at Friday’s impeachment hearing. She also enters the spotlight as the latest woman who has refused to acquiesce to Trump in the face of personal and gender-specific attacks.The story of Yovanovitch’s removal as Ukraine ambassador reflects some of the most complicated gender and political dynamics of Trump’s presidency. Now the impeachment probe is magnifying those dynamics as the first woman to publicly testify prepares to confront Trump’s fiercest congressional defenders, nearly all men, about a campaign by other male allies of the president to force her from her post. The symbolism of that conflict underscores the significance of the historic probe, which was initiated by the female speaker of the House-- Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)-- and made possible by female voters who helped deliver the House to Democrats in the last election.“Seeing someone like Masha Yovanovitch come forward is going to be an extremely difficult moment for Trump,” said Nancy McEldowney, a former ambassador to Bulgaria who served as director of the Foreign Service Institute and now teaches at Georgetown University, where Yovanovitch is a senior fellow.“What I suspect the world will see when she walks into that hearing room is an individual who is not tall physically but really is a towering figure of integrity, inner strength and unswerving devotion to public service and telling the truth,” McEldowney said.In what has emerged as a key episode for impeachment investigators, Yovanovitch was recalled early to Washington from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in May after facing an onslaught of attacks from right-wing media. With encouragement from Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani-- but with no evidence-- conspiracy theorists painted her as an enemy of the president who used her power to covertly undermine him and assist Democrats.In an Oct. 11 deposition on Capitol Hill, Yovanovitch said she was told that the decision “was coming from President Trump” and that if she was not “physically out of Ukraine, that there would be, you know, some sort of public either tweet or something else from the White House” against her.“I was upset,” she told lawmakers that day. “I wanted an explanation because this is rather unusual.”She described her removal as “a dangerous precedent . . . that private interests and people who don’t like a particular American ambassador could combine to, you know, find somebody who was more suitable for their interests.”Other career diplomats who pushed the State Department to defend Yovanovitch said they were met with silence. P. Michael McKinley, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, resigned in part because of the department’s unwillingness to support its personnel.“The disparagement of a career diplomat doing her job was unacceptable to me,” he told lawmakers in a deposition on Oct. 16.The sudden and unexplained removal of a respected ambassador, followed by the revelation of Trump’s July 25 comments about Yovanovitch to Zelensky, sent shock waves through the foreign policy world.
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