Park pens

Monster Island's favorite Stupogant™, Robert Park, the daytripper who decided to traipse into North Korea to purposefully get himself arrested, has penned an op-ed in the Washington Examiner on the food shortages in North Korea. As you may recall, Mr Park eventually had to be fished out of Pyongyang by the Obama administration, which almost certainly had to use some of its own political and/or actual capital in order to rescue him. His retrieval from North Korea occurred only after he gave a glowing thumbs-up to the regime (which he later recanted).

Though I disagree with the guy's former tactics and I think he is mentally unstable, I do pretty much agree with the gist of his article (what does that say about me?!), which is that any famine up in the DPRK is not caused by natural disasters but rather is orchestrated by the regime, which uses food as a means of control. Go and read it yourself.

My favorite part, though, is the description of the author at the end:

Human rights activist Robert Park traveled to North Korea in December 2009.

That inadequately understated sentence reminds me of Kenneth Markle, the former USFK soldier who served fourteen years in ROK's foreigner prison for the brutal rape and murder of a South Korean bargirl. From his cell, he would write occasional pieces that got into the Pacific Stars & Stripes and even Korea's English-language papers, with the simple description that, "The author is a resident of Cheonan."

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