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The National Football League is currently convulsed by a scandal involving the payment of bounties to players to knock opposing players out of the game. While this practice is surely barbaric, I sort of feel like the prefect in Casablanca “shocked” to learn that there is gambling going on at Rick’s. You see, there were bounties paid on my high school team, so I had always assumed implicitly that such bounties were paid at higher levels of the sport. But then again I went to high school in Texas.
A while back we ran a post on the use by a South Korean army unit of images of Kim Jong-il and other regime heavyweights in target practice drills. The North Koreans were apoplectic. (To refresh your memory the KCNA commentary is reproduced below.) Now we learn via KCNA video reproduced by Yonhap and the Daily NK that North Korean military units are using targets painted with the name of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in rifle shooting and knife throwing exercises. (I guess that they could not afford actual photos.) There are two ways to think about it. One can take the KCNA line that this is barbarous and deserves…well I’ll just let them explain themselves. Or one can take the Captain Renault perspective that, well, boys will be boys. Play it again, Sam, there ain't no Roger Goodell to impose fines and suspensions.
To refresh your memory, KCNA from June 2011:
“The Lee Myung Bak group of traitors…. staged such rowdyism as setting up a target and daring fire at it, a thrice-cursed criminal act of hurting the supreme dignity of the DPRK.
This is nothing but hysteric spasm hard to imagine with a normal brain and a height of confrontation with compatriots, action shocking all the Koreans….The recent hideous provocation is a never-to-be pardoned treason...
There were in the south "Yusin" dictator [ed. note: Park Chung-hee] who earned an ill fame for escalating confrontation with fellow countrymen and a military fascist man-hunter who made the nation shudder. But they dared not hurt the supreme dignity of the DPRK…
The Lee group betrayed without hesitation its true colors as maniacs keen on confrontation with fellow countrymen who would make even the successive fascists blush and as gangsters ignorant of even elementary ethics and morality.
Much upset by this, the Lee group is pretending to know about it for the first time and the puppet military warmongers are staging such poor farce as floating the story that "it was an "individual action." The group, however, can never shirk the responsibility for its treason.
The General Staff of the KPA clarifies the following stand, reflecting the towering resentment of the KPA and people against the hideous provocation committed by the group and their unanimous will to take a thousand-fold revenge upon it:
1. The south Korean puppet authorities should take a measure for immediately meting out a stern punishment to the prime movers who committed the above-said most hideous crimes against the nation…
2. The south Korean puppet authorities should make a formal apology to the whole nation for the hideous provocation and provide an official guarantee for thoroughly preventing its recurrence…
3. From now on the units of the three services of the KPA and the Worker-Peasant Red Guards will launch practical and overall retaliatory military actions to wipe out the group of traitors at a stroke.
It is the final conclusion drawn by the DPRK that there is no need to sit face to face with the Lee group of traitors hell-bent on the confrontation with fellow countrymen and that it is necessary to settle accounts with it only by force of arms…
All the units of the three services of the KPA and the Worker-Peasant Red Guards will escalate the practical and overall retaliatory military actions till the puppet authorities have taken measures to punish the prime movers for the recent cases and make an apology for them.
The world will clearly witness what are the retaliatory actions to be taken by the whole army and all the people to protect the supreme dignity of the country and nation and what destiny will await Lee Myung Bak, the traitor for all ages, and the puppet military warmongers running wild without any fear.”
