When the Washington Post Sounds More Like Pravda Than Pravda...

That's a bit of a concern. This sort of thing to me is always good for a chuckle. North Korea and Cuba keep fighting it out as the left's favorite example of "working communism". The trend continues in the Washington Post in a fawning article covering Arirang, the festival celebrating the 60th anniversary of the takeover of North Korea by the Worker's Party.

While the festival is no doubt spectacular, the Dear Leader being big on entertainment and production of same, it's not much different than the Soviet's old May Day parades. I've often thought that if big Kim has lived just a little longer, lil Kim Jong Il might have been an exit visa and a marriage to Katie Holmes away from being the next big Hollywood producer.

Not surpisingly, the bulk of the Post's coverage of the fair contains puff statements about the "Worker's Paradise".

...analysts have said it amounts to a demonstration of public support for Kim, 63, in which hundreds of thousands of North Koreans are attending the festival -- many walking for days to reach the stadium. The festival is being so well attended, North Korean officials said, that its original run of two weeks was extended to the entire month of October.

That of course doesn't take into account that most were likely informed they would be going to show support for the Dear Leader, possibly at rifle point. The Post doesn't really touch on that aspect, preferring to portray it as a sort of Communist Mardi Gras.

Meanwhile, modest economic reforms made in North Korea since 2002 appear to have somewhat eased the country's bitter poverty and once-rampant starvation.

That, massive amounts of Western food aid and the dieing off of the "surplus population" I'm sure has made food more plentiful for the survivors. How positively festive.

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, former UN ambassador under Clinton who was one of the invited foreign guests of course had to rain on the Post's parade.

"The atmosphere there is the best I've seen in 15 years," Richardson said during a stop in Tokyo after his visit. He said he went to Pyongyang by personal invitation from the government, and not as an official U.S. envoy. "Of course, there are still problems," he added, "but the atmosphere is much improved."

I mean, there's not the rampant starvation and poverty at this festival so at least those things are looking better. Bill of course didn't ask to visit any of the internal gulags where so many political prisoners and undoubtedly a few kidnapped foreigners rot away. I guess decorum had to be observed. That and I heard they had Bill's favorite drink, Fresca, to keep him occupied. Sarcasm aside, saying "Of course, there are still problems" is like saying "Of course, the Titanic still sunk and killed all those people, but..." There is no apologizing for a dictatorial regime of the level of hostility and inhumanity of North Korea, but a former Clintonite still finds a way.

He said the North Koreans, who contend that they had a bumper farm crop this year, would allow as many as 60 of the roughly 100 foreign aid workers in North Korea to stay.

That just struck me as funny. It reminded me of the Soviets saying they had bumper crops but still demanding food aid. What did they have, 70 years or so of bad weather? Asia must not be a very good place for agriculture.

Much of the rest of the piece talks about how wonderful and dazzling the show was, from a country where the population isn't even as free as prisoners in a US jail. The last paragraph was particularly eerie for me, though.

The spectacle often seemed particularly aimed at the South Korean visitors. At one point, participants held up flashcards creating a montage of South and North Korean children, while uttering the chant: "How much longer do we have to be split due to foreign forces?" Soon, most of the visiting South Koreans were chiming in for the chorus: "We are one."

Yes, how long do we have to wait for the Americans to leave so we can conquer your stupid southern @sses and integrate your GDP into Kim's next film project. Then South Korea can be just as prosperous and free as North Korea. Yay. I had a friend who served in the Army in Korea for years. He used to say there were two kinds of Koreans, young Koreans who couldn't see the big deal of why North Korea was so scary and who thought the US should just go home and old Koreans who had either survived the North Korean invasion or had developed some sense and whose greatest dread was that the US would do what the younger ones wanted and leave them at the mercy of the North. Wonder how many young Koreans were in that delegation...

North and South Korea couldn't provide a greater contrast in the differences of the success of capitalism and the failure of communism. That the Post fails to seriously address this, and prefers to sound more like Socialist Monthly Digest, is an all too common and all too sad failing of our major media outlets.

Hat tip to Newsbusters for this one.