What Kim Jong Il really wanted: a formal portrait with the former president

News from North Korea is always bizarre, but the Bill-Clinton-saving-the-journalists story is the wackiest in awhile. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos said what ruler Kim Jong Il really wanted was some quality time with the Big Dog.

The big break came just two weeks ago during a phone call home when the women said the North Koreans would let them go if Bill Clinton would come to North Korea as an envoy.

“The North Koreans made it clear they wanted a former president, they wanted Clinton,” ABC News chief Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos reported…

All of this must come as a bit of a slap to the head of the State Department. Poor Hillary can’t catch a break.

The story that Bill Clinton was en route to North Korea broke as the secretary of state arrived in Kenya hoping to highlight her commitment to Africa.

Instead, the spotlight was on her husband on a different continent and Hillary Clinton, who had been calling for the release of Ling and Lee for months, was left trying to catch some of the reflected glow from that spotlight.

The secretary told reporters in Nairobi today that she was “very pleased to get the news that my husband’s plane had taken off with the two young women on board.”

I hate to think what late night talk show hosts will do with the statement that Sec. Clinton was glad her husband’s plane took off with two young women on board, but I’ll leave it to them to elaborate.

All of this comes just a couple of weeks after the North Koreans insulted the former president’s wife.

At a meeting of southeast Asian nations in Phuket, Thailand, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman blasted Clinton for what he called a “spate of vulgar remarks unbecoming for her position everywhere she went since she was sworn in,” according to the state-run KCNA news agency.

The spokesman called Clinton “by no means intelligent” and a “funny lady.”

“Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping,” the statement said.

Meanwhile, Il was said to have accomplished his goal: he had a 75-minute one-on-one with Bill Clinton, followed by a two-hour dinner, a photograph of the former president chatting with him, and a formal portrait of the two. Mrs. Clinton, of course, was not included.

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