Ka-splash

Man, I want to play poker with Kim Jong Il. There is no advantage he won't blow. Launching a long-range missile gives him no more capital than threatening to do so. The mere threat gave him leverage with the international community to bargain for...well, it's not exactly clear what.

But instead of using his hole cards to draw in the other side and extract more Elvis movies, he lays them right out there on the table for everyone to see his two nine off suit. He launches it and what happens? The missile carrying the "communications satellite" ends up in the Pacific, another North Korean technological flop.

So now the big worry is that if they have successfully created nuclear warheads -- which of course, we do have reason to doubt they've done right -- we have to be concerned that in an act of aggression, he'll launch them and accidentally drop them on his own people...something he now only does metaphorically.

Sometimes you have to wonder if the villains from Rocky and Bullwinkle weren't just ahead of their time.