"Do you think you have a responsibility to ask him about it, so that you don't be perceived as sort of propping up his regime, his cult of personality?"This from George Stephanopoulos, talking head for the American Broadcasting Corps and former senior advisor & political enabler to the most narcissistic US Presidency the world has seen. Or had seen.
He was interviewing Dennis Rodman - a former professional basketball player known as much for his offcourt flash as his exceptional defensive skill and rebounding prowess - who had just made a trip to North Korea in support of a children's basketball camp and a hoops exhibition featuring some of the Harlem Globetrotters and North Korean players, all for VICE magazine's HBO series VICE Guide to North Korea.
Like the American president, Kim Jong-un is a basketball fan. Also like the American president, the new supreme leader is apparently not without charisma, prompting Rodman to refer to him as "awesome" and "honest", at which point you hear the interviewer's voice-over, "This about a dictator who presides over prison camps, allows millions to starve, and has threatened to destroy the United States."
This, itself, from a guy whose boss presided over a privatization-wave of American prisons and the starving to death of a half-million Iraqi children, none of which interfered with his working to reelect him.
In the interview with the ABC host, Rodman described Kim as a friend and a great guy, to which Gorge Staphylococcus asked, "A great guy who puts 200,000 people in prison camps?"
Rodman replied, "We do some of the same things here," but was unfortunately not articulate enough, or ready with the details to back up his allusion to the US penal system, and back down his inquisitor.
So when G. Staph Infection - responding to Rodman's stated intention to return to the republic - handed Rodman a Human Rights Watch report on North Korea, gently but condescendingly admonishing him to, "Maybe ask some questions about that," the basketball player was ill-equipped to remind him that Human Rights Watch has loads of reports on the United States, as well, that he could "maybe ask" his own supreme leaders about:
http://www.hrw.org/united-states/us-program
http://www.hrw.org/topic/counterterrorism/cia-activities
http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/01/31/us-injustices-filling-prisons
http://www.hrw.org/en/united-states/us-program/excessive-punishment-and-restrictions
