Last night, I came home, and I turned on the news. It was 8 o'clock last night, I was so exhausted. I just laid down on my bed and my son came in. And he laid down next to me and he was talking to me about the car chase videos that he had seen. These amazing car chase videos where, you know, the police are chasing these guys. "They're so stupid. And, Dad, how could they possibly think they're going to get away?" I was less than a great dad last night. I was so tired. And the news was on.
And he told me about a few of the car chases. And I think he could tell that I was distracted. And he just paused. And he then just kind of looked at the news. And he said, "What's happening, Dad?"
Now, they were talking about everything that was going on with North Korea.
I said, "I'm not sure, son." Not lying to him. But I didn't need to fill him with my fears.
I said, "I don't know. But, you know, the world has seen this stuff before. The Cuban missile crisis was the last time we saw something like this perhaps, and we backed away from the brink." Thanks to X-Men, I didn't have to explain the Cuban missile crisis to him. He had seen that in the movies.
I'm not so sure this time that we are the people or that even the press is behaving the same. Last night, it felt almost as if the press was egging the president on, just egging him on. "Come on. Come on. You're not going to have any credibility unless you back it up."
"Gee, Mr. President, you can't just say things like that." I never heard that during the Obama administration. And I -- and maybe it was just me. Maybe this was not what was being said, but this is what I heard last night, that we are entering a position to where we have to go to war. We have to do something now or we have no credibility.
No. You know, perhaps we don't have to do anything, except the right thing. Because of our credibility? What credibility do we have, for the love of Pete?
I was watching it last night, and I saw Kim Jong-un. He's not crazy.
I did a whole chalkboard, a whole entire episode on Kim Jong-un, which --- you need to understand, he's not a crazy guy. He's not. You think he is. But he's not.
He's actually quite measured. He is in his own country, if you understand who he's speaking to, who his audience is, he's ruthless. He is evil, but he's not crazy.
The one thing he can't do is back down. He cannot look like he is under the thumb of the United States, or he will lose power.
As I was watching this last night, what was going through my head was, why are they so far ahead of the estimates? Where is that coming from? How are we that bad at intelligence in North Korea? And if so, could it also be that they don't have working nuclear weapons that are, you know, able to go on the ICBM? Is that possible?
So what kind of faulty information could we be operating under? And I'm not one to bury my head in the sand. How will we know what's good information and what's not? And how are they so far ahead? Is Russia or Iran helping them? Is anyone else involved in this?
Personally, I'm a big fan of our president making promises and then keeping them. I was a big fan of what he did in Syria. However, we're way over that self-imposed red line. We've been over that red line that we put out there --- you know, months ago we've crossed that line. Let's stop ratcheting up the rhetoric because we have to. No, no, no, we don't. Perhaps this is a time to say, hey, it looks like all of the past presidents have failed on North Korea.
That the world has failed on North Korea. And the time to act on a rogue state is before they have nuclear weapons. Most Americans don't begin to even understand what war with North Korea even really means.
And let me tell you really clearly: It could mean the end of the western way of life. It could mean millions of dead, unlike anything we've seen since World War II. Millions of dead.
The collapse of the western economies. And perhaps nukes used on Japan, Guam, Los Angeles, all from North Korea. And us using most likely tactical nukes.
We've missed the opportunity. The world did nothing. Former presidents have failed because they've appeased or ignored or were in a dream world. Let's not blame this president for the mistakes of the past presidents. And let's not encourage this president to act hastily.
How long before Iran has nukes? I don't know if Kim Jong-un will use nukes, but I am really pretty clear that anybody who is saying that the Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam, who is the Promised One from their, you know, religious scripture, that is going to come and bring fire and death and wash the world in blood and fire --- any president of --- of the supreme council now in Iran, who is coming out and making statement day after day, the Mahdi is here, he has arrived, he's walking among us, and soon, that day will come. And they believe in their religion, that that is a good thing, those guys will use nukes. What are we doing on that one?
The media never paid attention to that. They won't pay attention. I could say that until I'm blue in the face. They wouldn't pay attention to the caliphate. "Oh, that's just talk." Really? Was it just talk? Was it?
And so you lectured me about how you can't take people at their word. And yet, last night, all I saw on television was the excoriation on television and how we have to take him at his word, when everybody in America knows, he did not mean we're going to rain nukes down on North Korea. At least everybody in America knows that.
The rest of the world doesn't. North Korea doesn't. It was a huge mistake. But for you to hold him to his language and say how important language is when you're a leader of a state, but then never to have held North Korea or Iran to their language, when you've never held the PLO to their language, the Muslim Brotherhood to their language, please, don't start with me.
I didn't tell my son any of these things last night. He fell asleep next to me holding my hand. He was not afraid. He was not worried. He wasn't thinking about any of the things that were going through my head.
And as I watched television, I remembered I was his age when I was worried about missiles flying over the polar cap, that I knew 18 minutes from the Soviet Union to Seattle, 30 minutes tops, the only warning you would have. I grew up in the Cold War. Anybody who is my age knows and is not looking forward to going back to a world where you and your children are afraid of things like that.
I watched in my head those scenes that I could vividly remember of Jason Robards in the movie The Day After. And now that I'm old, I realized that that came out in 1983. Why? Because Ronald Reagan was calling them the evil empire and talking tough. And the Democrats didn't want to talk tough on the communist nation and the Soviet Union. They thought that was the fastest way to nuclear annihilation. They have been proven wrong. But now knowing what I know as an adult, that movie was not to tell the American people anything, other than: Your president is evil.
A loud commercial came on and brought me out of that memory and back to where I was, laying side by side over the blankets, horizontally across my bed with my son, watching the news of the day. And as I came back in, I realized he hadn't been holding my hand. I had been holding his.
