• Erick Erickson insists upon a Great Purge to keep the GOP pure. Erick, you sick sick Stalinist bastard! [RedState]
• Sarah Palin is “ready” to be “president,” according to “Rush” “Limbaugh.” [Gateway Pundit]
• Who else is on the CIA payroll, besides Ahmed Wali Karzai and Luis Posada Carriles? The answer will not surprise you in the least. [The Plank]
• Oh, GREAT: The terrorists get free swine flu vaccines while pregnant women and stray children are encouraged to stock up on Emergen-C and hope for the best. This is health care reform? We want America back! [Ace of Spades]
• Remember when Bill Clinton parachuted into North Korea and whispered delicious lies into Kim Jong-il’s tender ear and then saved two lady-journalists from a decade of slave labor? Yeah well, that part about Kim Jong-il never actually happened — hot damn, it was Photoshopped! [Daily Intel]

NO, SORRY, WE CANNOT FULLY MOCK THIS TRAGIC PAJAMAS TEEVEE MOVIE: As much as we like to take requests from young conservative portions of the Internet during “Monday Fun Lunch Hour,” this terrible Pajamas TV thing, where their token black guy gets tortured by Nancy Pelosi and Kim Jong Il, is just impossible to finish. The astonishing racism near the middle — haw haw, the yellows can’t pronounce the letter “L,” SO… SO IT SOUNDS LIKE “R” ALL THE TIME INSTEAD! — is decent. And yet. Why is Nancy Pelosi stripping? This is when we turned it off. Thanks anyway! [PJTV via Conor Friedersdorf]

You know how some business trips end up with everybody naked in the hot tub singing Don’t Stop Believin’, and others end with everybody awkwardly standing around making small talk while furtively glancing at their watches? Bill Clinton’s North Korea summer vacation trip likely falls into the latter category, which is a historical first for Bill Clinton. [The Awl via ... North Korea Propaganda Office, maybe?]

BILL CLINTON SAVES LADIES FROM NORTH KOREA: Uhh, hooray! In a “private mission” rife with secret diplomatic motives and back-door conversations with the U.S. government, Bill Clinton hopped on a jetplane to North Korea, talked up Kim Jong Il for a while, probably offered him exclusive bidding rights to various natural resource contracts in autocratic third-world countries, and won the release of those two American journalists who had been sentenced to HARD LABOR back in March. Okay, Bill Clinton! [CNN]

Oh hey did you hear crazy dwarf-alien Kim Jong-Il has been shooting rockets into the sea, by North Korea? No? ARE YOU SILLY AMERICANS SO OBSESSED WITH THE DEATH OF KING-POP MICHAEL JACKSON AS TO NOT FOLLOW NORTH KOREA’S MIGHTY THREATS? Well, Lil’ Kim wants you to know he is twice as weird as Wacko Jacko, with the additional freaky habits of kidnapping regional movie stars and starving his people, because why not, right? Dwarf motherfucker got to have his Cristal & ‘hos. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon

You would be forgiven if you assumed that the members of our political class were terrible killer cyborgs, sent from the future to kill us all, with skeletons and organs made from metal and plastic. Or perhaps you believe them to be terrible hell-demons, with skin made out of scales wrapped around viscera of pure fire. But you might be surprised to learn that neither of these descriptions are true. Elected officials are real humans, like you! If you prick them, do they not bleed? If you tickle them, do they not laugh? Also, they poop and have huge boners, as you’ll see after the jump. MORE »

Over the weekend, North Korea pwned the capitalists by launching its dumb rocket over Japan and around the sea. After about 2,000 miles it crashed in the water, the end. American officials determined that it was one of Kim Jong Il’s famous Taepodong-2 missiles, which are not quite at “Full ICBM” quality, but still pretty baller. Eventually one of these things will be able to bomb Sarah Palin’s house in Alaska. AND YET the North Koreans are still pretending that this rocket was only launched to drop off its satellite payload in space, and they’re insisting that it was successful, despite the fact that it FELL IN THE WATER. MORE »

Dear President Bush:

Thank you for your letter of December 3. The Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and best natural golfer in the world asked me to write to inform you that he feels he has done a more than adequate job of revealing our nuclear resources. We will not be responding to further requests for clarification. Please remit further fuel, oil and steel payments to this address per our agreement, as we plan to continue to bolster our war-deterrent capabilities and don’t wish to have to buy those things ourselves while we’re spending our limited resources on our nuclear weapons program. Again, thank you for your concerns, but they are completely unfounded.

Sincerely,
Random Lackey.

North Korea Says It Has Said Enough [NYT]

I know I ain’t really wrote nuthin’ befer, but you gotsta know I was feelin all aukwerd like after that whole Axes of Evel thing I sed and I hope you knows I just sed that stuff because it was on the teleprompter thingie and didn’t reely mean it, ok? So, yeah, like, my girl Condee sed that I shuld rite you and ask all nice that you play fare and do what you told China you were gonna do about tellin all of us about yer nuculer weapons and stuff, ok? Cuz like I know you sed that you wood tell us yer secret stuff by the end of the yeer, but Condee sed that mabee you meant like yer yeer and not our yeer and I got confuzed but can you plees do it soon because I don’t reely like riting letters. Yers, George. [LA Times]

North and South Korea are close to finally ending their 57-year-old war. Of course the US will refuse to sign the peace treaty until Kim Jong Il officially gives up all of his nuclear ambitions, a goal we’ve assigned China to take care of. Also, if possible, can a “winner” be declared? It’s kinda depressing when wars end in 50-year stalemates! [WP]

Each week, the Comics Curmudgeon helps explain Today’s Cartoons.

Other than deep discounts on ink, is there anything political cartoonists as a class like better than a good metaphor? No. But just as sometimes you run out of ink and all the office supply stores are closed and you have to go to the bodega on the corner and you end up paying OUTRAGEOUS markup on little bottles of ink, and to add insult to injury you have to pay through a little door in a huge bullet-proof window and they write your $20 with a special marker to see if it’s counterfit … um, where was this going? Oh yeah, sometimes you go to press with the metaphor you have, not the metaphor you might want. Here are some of the attempts to draw parallels that maybe weren’t perfect, but, hey, deadline’s comin’.

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