My Minnesota pals Guy Green and Tony Bauer recently included me in an e-mail exchange regarding Dennis Rodman's edition of the Jane Fonda Communist Workout featuring North Korea's new favorite son (of god), Kim Jong-Un.   This little incident, which in itself ranks up there on the sanity scale with Maxine Waters' warning of 170,000,000 Americans losing their jobs due to the sequester, is nevertheless a timely reminder of just how power-mad progressives really are, and how thoroughly their power-madness obliterates any notions of conscience or decency.

During the aforementioned e-mail exchange, Mr.  Bauer quipped, "Refresh my memory again on how a US citizen goes about traveling to these forbidden communist destinations?  Or perhaps I need to direct my question to Jane Fonda, Harry Belafonte and John Kerry?"  This is where I decided my experience as a six-year resident of South Korea might allow me to shed some light on the situation, as follows.

If a U.S. citizen wants to travel to North Korea, there is a process.  There are arranged tours to the DMZ, where groups can be taken to a room which is literally on the border.  You are permitted to stand on the other side of the table in that room - voilà, you are in North Korea.  If you sign up for the deluxe version of the tour, you are bused to a designated part of a particular town inside the border.  In that town, you may stay overnight at a simple but, by all reports, adequate hotel, eat a meal or two of the traditional fare, and have a North Korean beer.  Walking around the neighborhood, you may chance to meet a local or two.  They are apparently polite, and pleased to meet a foreigner.  Then you are bused back to the South.  At a premium, you can take a hike on Baekdu Mountain, the highest on the peninsula. 

In any case, your trip back to the South will take place on schedule, and you will not miss the bus.  And you will not stray beyond the immediate area of your tour bus.  And you will not go taking pictures without approval. 

Dennis Rodman was given the super-deluxe, by invitation only, version of this tour.  He must have won it on a radio trivia quiz.  This version is roughly the same as all the others, except that instead of a personable bus driver, your guide is a raving lunatic.  Apparently only people judged dumb enough not to recognize they are on a Potemkin village excursion are granted this highest privilege.  To be fair, I guess this all seemed reasonable to Mr. Rodman, as, looking at him, I imagine a tour of his home would have a lot in common with a tour of North Korea.

Having said that, it occurs to me that rather than focusing on Rodman, a goof, we ought to use this occasion to recall a supposedly serious statesman of the progressive persuasion who had the very same reaction to a North Korean dictator.   Bill Clinton's secretary of state Madeleine Albright took great pains to humanize Kim Jong-Il, and to urge everyone to see him as a rational, witty man who liked American movies and wanted to exchange e-mails with her.   She expressed giddy awe about the communist propaganda festival and missile parade she was treated to during her official visit there - during which, incidentally, she prefigured unofficial Obama basketball envoy Rodman by presenting Jong-Un's dad with a basketball signed by Michael Jordan.  Overall, if it hadn't turned out that the Dear Leader was lying to her about all that nuclear stuff, their e-mail relationship might have become something very special.

And then of course there is Jimmy Carter, who rained gifts on Dear Jong-Il like your favorite aunt used to do for you at Christmas.   

We all understand Dennis Rodman's attitude about the most oppressive regime on the planet - he's as crazy as his host, or at least does a good job of pretending to be so for the cameras.  But what about the Democratic statesmen and foreign policy experts?   How do we explain their versions of Rodman's "awesome guy" effusion?  

The answer, sadly, is that the progressive politicians admire the communist dictator for roughly the same reasons Rodman does: they don't see the death, starvation, and a population's indoctrinated mass veneration of its own torturer - they see power, and they find it "awesome."

Watch related AT Video of Dennis Rodman After Returning From North Korea