From The Niagara Falls Reporter
By Bill Gallagher

President George W. Bush is talking to our enemies and making significant progress. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is salvaging a shred of accomplishment she hopes will cloak her long parade of diplomatic failures. Vice President Dick Cheney is seething, locked in his bat cave, sipping bourbon and wishing he could personally torture someone — Condi Rice, for starters.

North Korea got scratched from Bush’s Axis of Evil litany and removed from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror by agreeing to declare its nuclear program to the outside world, paving the way for negotiations aimed at keeping the entire Korean peninsula nuclear-free.

Since Bush has long scoffed at diplomacy, and Cheney — his master and commander — would rather bomb than talk any day, the deal with North Korea marks a seismic shift for the administration’s foreign policy. Though time is running out in the final year of his presidency, Bush has finally done something right. Hooray for Bush! There, I said it.

Of course, the talks should have begun eight years ago as a continuation of the negotiations President Bill Clinton and his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, initiated. Then there might have been a chance of dissuading Kim Jong Il from building the nukes he now has and the missile capability to deliver them.

The North Koreans, perhaps with choreographic counseling from Americans, provided the conspicuous visuals television news just laps up. A cooling tower used for a reactor extracting plutonium for its nuclear weapons was demolished with a blast.

It was more symbol than substance, and I wonder how many people watching the event realized that, as part of the deal, the North Koreans, for now, get to keep the nuclear weapons they’ve already produced.

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