*Much has been made over the geopolitical challenge presented by China’s legal activist Chen Guangcheng. Already, relations between the U.S. and China are frayed over trade, North Korea, Iran and Syria. Nobody needed this–but apparently Washington and Beijing have been able to save face.
It looks like Chen will get a visa to come to the U.S. to study, one that will also accommodate his family. Thus, the U.S. extracts a dissident from his personal hell and China is rid of a high-profile, increasingly embarrassing internal irritant. Both the U.S. and China dodged a foreign policy bullet with diplomatic cover.
That pretty much leaves only one awkward, really embarrassing issue unresolved. How the hell did the Chinese let a blind guy escape in the first place?
* Now we hear that weapons analysts suspect that those brand-new North Korean missiles recently displayed at a high-profile military parade might be fakes. Call it the Potemkin approach to military prowess. You never know with the Hermit Kingdom. Perhaps its leader really isn’t a 20-something fat kid with a bad haircut.
*Less-than-Secret Service. The still burgeoning scandal involving Secret Service and military personnel and prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia underscores the ultimate security breach shy of assassination: access. That’s why the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair was so dangerous. That’s why what JFK’s procurer, David Powers, did was so risky. Who knows what agendas come with paramour play?
In the Colombian case, who knows what a passed-out, compromised Secret Service agent might lead to? Frankly, would someone who takes chances with hookers and vodka be trusted to take a bullet for the president?
And anyone believe that this gaggle of frat-boy agents–including Dania Londono Suarez’s one-night, soused suitor–were caught and fired the first time they strayed from their presidential-advance assignment? Ted Nugent would have done a better job.
I’d like to know what President Obama, for whom access is personal, really said when apprised of agents’ appalling lack of judgment in preparing for his arrival.