Does Barack Obama listen to himself?

We are more than willing to engage in negotiations to get North Korea on a path of peaceful coexistence with its neighbors, and we want to encourage their prosperity. But belligerent, provocative behavior that threatens neighbors will be met with significant, serious enforcement of sanctions that are in place.

Does this mean that if North Korea continues down this reckless path, that their actions will be met by… continuing with the existing sanctions regime that failed to deter them? Or does it mean that once we determined that they are on this course, we will begin ’serious enforcement’ of the sanctions that exist now?

Perhaps it’s option three: the President was speaking without the teleprompter again.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has declared itself to no longer be party to the 1953 armistice that halted the Korean War and established the uneasy peace that has reigned on the southeast Asian peninsula for the last 56 years.

The announcement comes on the heels of a long-range missile test, a nuclear detonation, and multiple short-range missile launches, none of which represented physical attacks on neighboring states but all of which were very much intended to be seen as threats by those who would dare out pressure on the hermit kingdom to walk back its aggressive policies and live within the bounds of international consensus and agreements.

Though the Republic of Korea is used to such rhetoric and posturing from its northern neighbor, Pyongyang’s latest ratcheting up of tension on the peninsula comes as a direct result of the ROK announcing its decision to become a member of a program known as the Proliferation Security Initiative, or PSI.

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On Iran, that is:

Sen. Benjamin Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland, says Obama agrees with George W. Bush: “Iran’s got to stop financing terrorist activity. Iran’s got to give up its desire to become a nuclear weapons power. Its as clear as that.”

But what does Ben Cardin (D-MD) really know, anyway? After all, this is the guy who claimed the Patriot Act of 2001 “predated” his 1986 election to Congress, telling his alarmist supporters he couldn’t stop it because it was already in effect when he came to DC (never mind the fact that he actually voted to reauthorize the policy in 2006, when running for the Senate).

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