Jimmy Carter Arrives In North Korea To Build Peanut Houses of Peace

Oh, thank you, North Korean YouTube, that almost looks like a real news segment! Yes, Kim Jong-il gets to paste together another fun photo collage of him with a former American president, and America gets back one of its citizens. It's a win-win situation! So Jimmy Carter has arrived, and here he is receiving flowers and an angry communist salute from the president of North Korea's child trade union.

Officially, Washington described his trip as a private humanitarian mission to secure the release of Aijalon Mahli Gomes, an American from Boston who was sentenced in April to eight years of hard labor and fined $700,000 for illegally entering the North.

People fly to North Korea all the time. Business as usual. Nothing to see here. The U.S. does not speak to North Korea, but sometimes its former heads of state go there, coincidentally, on a relaxing vacation.

But Mr. Carter’s trip loomed large because of his track record of helping defuse the first Korean nuclear crisis more than 16 years ago.

Oh good, Jimmy Carter will stop North Korea from building nuclear weapons for another decade and a half while he's there. And then in another 16 years, he'll have to do it again, even though he will have disintegrated into a pool of skin and dried-out internal organs and peanuts by then.

We look forward to the photos North Korea releases of this event. Meanwhile, we can imagine Jimmy Carter smiling stupidly at a concert performed by this BADASS child drummer who showed up on the North Korea YouTube yesterday:

FUCK YEAH! SHOW JIMMY CARTER HOW WE ROCK OUT! [ NYT ]