The North Korean missile test has turned the TV anchors a little cautious, but that doesn’t mean the Clinton North Korea alums were cautious this morning in tooting their own sorry horn. On Fox & Friends, Wendy Sherman explicitly blamed Bush and his apparent fellow appeasers for the missile tests:

“At the beginning of the Bush administration six years ago, North Korea had enough plutonium for one or two nuclear weapons, plutonium that was created during father Bush’s term in office. No plutonium was created during the Clinton administration. And now, six years after the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency, North Korea has enough plutonium for six, eight, or ten nuclear weapons. So we certainly haven’t made progress over the last six years and I think what you saw from Secretary Perry is enough of letting North Korea go after redline after redline, and sort of thumb its nose at the United States. It’s time to get serious about what we’re doing to stop North Korea’s not only missile capability but more importantly their nuclear capability.”

At least Fox’s Mike Jerrick came back by suggesting that some would say the Clinton folks didn’t exactly hold North Korea accountable, to say the least. (See Rich Lowry’s take in 2003 here).

On CBS, Early Show anchor Harry Smith asked current Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns if Kim Jong Il was “just nuts.” But Bill Richardson aggressively declared that talks have to be direct and unilateral, that you don’t annoy the crazy man, you pander to him to avoid his egotistical fits:

Richardson: “You have to talk to them directly with the North Koreans, it’s a question of status. They feel…”
Harry Smith: “But the Bush Administration has said a long time, were not going to do one-on-one with these guys.”
Bill Richardson: “Well, that policy isn’t working. Obviously, with what’s happened. What makes sense is to proceed with one-on-one talks between Christopher Hill, the Assistant Secretary, who is very capable. The North Koreans trust him, who’s in the region, to set up the next range of six-party talks where you talk about North Korea abandoning their nuclear weapons in exchange basically for a no-attack policy by the six-party countries. North Korea is unpredictable. You don’t negotiate with them like they’re another country. They’re surreal. They’re totally isolated. They’re tightly controlled, the cult of personality. They don’t react like you and I do. It’s not give and take with them. It’s take, and then they will gauge your reaction as to how soon it takes for you to agree with them. So you can’t normally deal with them like any other country negotiating with each other….The reality is that North Korea is dangerous. And it makes sense to deal with them directly. Now, we did that in the Clinton administration. For ten years, they didn’t develop nuclear weapons. Yes, they went out of their agreement but, at the same time, that worked, that broad stability.”