They may be crazy, but the North Korea leadership is not stupid. Taking advantage of the US's Iraq obsession and the world's attention on Powell's UN speech today, North Korea announced it was restarting its nuclear facilities.

Note that this is not about "suspicions", or "informants", or unsupported allegations. North Korea bluntly announced their intention to restart a facility that has one function only -- the building of nuclear weapons.

Given the fact that North Korean missiles can hit Alaska and Hawaii, and are close to developing ICBMs capable of hitting the US mainland, and given that North Korea has shown a willingness to sell its weapons technologies in pursuit of desperately needed hard currency, it's good to see that Bush has no interest whatsoever in dealing with this crisis.

In Bush's world, there are two things worthy of attention -- bombing Iraq and tax cuts. Anything else is merely background static or just another excuse for, er, bombing Iraq or passing new tax cuts.