This is just not the time

A rogue state headed by a nut case has successfully tested what is likely a thermonuclear device and is bragging that it is small enough to fit into the warhead of an existing ICBM, directly threatening the territory of both the United States and Australia, to say nothing of Japan.

Worse, it's the other country, besides the United States, with an infant as its head of state, and this infant has pretty much no checks on him. He has an entire country as his personal toy. A thermonuclear temper tantrum by Kim Sung Un is not a possibility we can permit.

But the problem doesn't stop there. If North Korea accumulates a sufficient arsenal of nuclear-tipped ICBMs- and given a relatively short length of time, it will- it becomes pretty much immune to even military countermeasures by the United States or anyone else no matter what crazy, aggressive thing Kim decides to do. It has a free hand not only with regard to South Korea but in all of Southeast Asia.

That leaves the President of the United States with a terrible decision, and there are essentially only two options. Neither is pretty. The first option is pre-emptive war.  That's the course advocated by the anti-Iraq War and anti-Libyan intervention Australian Labor politician Crispin Rovere in the article linked to in the first sentence of this paragraph.  Keep in mind that there is a strong probability that Kim will have at least a small arsenal of fission weapons and possibly an H-bomb or two to use, although his ability to hit America or Australia with them will be negligible.

On the other hand, Robert E. Kelly, an American professor at a South Korean university, claims that South Korea isn't worried about war- and neither are South Koreans.  But many Europeans are, and both American and South Korean forces seem to be preparing for a massive attack to take out the threat. Yet South Korea is temporarily deploying launchers for a U.S. missile defense system, and the South Korean Defense Minister has called for a return of American tactical nukes to the Korean peninsula.

Some advocate simply accepting a nuclear North Korea, as unthinkable as that seems. Everything short of war has, after all, already been tried and failed.

In short, this may well be one of the most serious moments we've faced since World War II. The Cuban Missle Crisis is the closest equivalent that comes to mind. But John F. Kennedy is not our president. Neither are Nixon or Humphrey or Reagan or Ford or Carter or either Clinton or any Bush. Our president is a notoriously impulsive, grandiose man who ascended to the Oval Office as the most ignorant president of modern times, a man who is not only thin-skinned and personally insecure but whose mental health is subject to serious question.

As to his judgment, suffice it to say that the man who outed an allied intelligence asset by blurting out information in the presence of foreign diplomats has chosen this particular moment to escalate tensions with South Korea over trade issues. His storm of Wagnerian bombast over the current crisis is worthy of Kim himself.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton had an interesting ad during the primary campaign against Barack Obama. It really should have been used against Trump last year. It would have been fair and reasonable in a sense that Lyndon Johnson's famous 1964 "Daisy Girl" commercial was not. Barry Goldwater was an intelligent and ultimately rational man, though given to a certain ideological rigidity and to the tendency to speak first and think later that Donald Trump also displays.

But then, so did Ronald Reagan, on occasion. It was a cheap shot when aimed at Goldwater. It wouldn't have been if aimed at Trump.

But this was a much tamer and calmer ad than the infamous "Daisy Girl." It centered on a red telephone ringing at three in the morning, presumably in the White House. It asked who you want to be the one who picks up the receiver. It attacked not so much Barack Obama's competence, but his experience. But in 2016, it would have been a just comment on both as regards Donald Trump.

I detest everything Hillary Clinton stands for. Her crazy Left positions on everything from abortion to social mores are anathema to me. The specter of Hillary appointing Supreme Court justices at a moment when several vacancies might well be imminent was the best- and almost the only- argument the Republicans had in the last campaign. And it was a good one.

I could never have voted for Hillary. But even the Supreme Court argument wasn't enough to get me to prefer Donald Trump's election to hers or move me from my principled support of the only candidate in the race who was actually fit to be president, independent Evan McMullin.

There was a different nightmare that more than counterbalanced it. It was the nightmare of that red telephone ringing at three in the morning. Even her mishandling of Benghazi, with all its tragic and lethal consequences, and her carelessness with regard to her use of a personal and insecure email server for classified information could not sway me from the view that we would be better off having her answer that phone than an impulsive, mentally unstable, and personally insecure clown like Donald John Trump.

But if that phone rings, it will be Trump who picks up the receiver. We can only pray that Gen. Kelly and Gen. Mattis and the other grownups in his administration outshout the alt-right bozos and keep him in check.

But if there was ever a time to chose a president on the basis of a temper tantrum, America, 2016 was not it. I consider it unlikely that there would ever have been a moment at which having Donald Trump in charge of the nuclear codes. But at a moment at which war and peace are at stake in what increasingly seems may become a binary decision between a cataclysm in Korea and accepting the unacceptable, this is just not the moment to have an unfit, irrational, impulsive and insecure man like Donald Trump either receiving the call or making it.