Opinion: In today’s pages: pacifying North Korea, saving Detroit and viewing soldiers’ coffins
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Today’s Op-Ed page presents a critique by former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s approach to North Korea. Guess what? He’s not a fan:
Clinton accurately called North Korea’s nuclear program ‘the most acute challenge to stability in northeast Asia,’ and she established the objective that the North ‘completely and verifiably eliminate’ its nuclear weapons activities. This familiar formulation implicitly -- and very unfortunately -- accepts that North Korea can keep a nuclear program as long as it is ‘peaceful.’ Whatever else it may be, this deal is not ‘smart.’ Leaving Pyongyang with any nuclear capability simply invites future abuse and a recurrence of the very problem we need to ‘eliminate.’
Columnist Tim Rutten urges President Obama to lift his predecessor’s ban on news coverage of military coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Wrapping up the page, Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, and former LA Times scribe James Gerstenzang tell Detroit automakers to change their approach to a federal bailout:
What the automakers don’t get is this: What’s good for America is good for GM (and Chrysler), and not the other way around. With billions of dollars of taxpayer cash in their bank accounts and billions more coming, GM and Chrysler work for us now. And they have to start thinking about how to serve the country. Americans need cars that go farther on a gallon of gasoline, pollute less and save money at the pump.
On the editorial page, the Times board lays into state Sen. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria) for demanding good-government reforms in exhange for the vote that would end the state’s budget crisis. It ridicules the ‘Buy America’ provision of the newly passed federal stimulus package. And demonstrating impeccable timing, it levels a broadside at Facebook, calling on it to drop new terms of service that claimed the right to use members’ material even after they remove it or delete their accounts. Ahem. Turns out that late last night, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company had dropped the controversial change and was working on new language. I console myself with the thought that the editorial ran on the Times website for at least half an hour last night before becoming outdated.