Twelve Years

Today in North Korea, two American journalists



were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor in a North Korean prison camp.



Yeah, doesn't look like much fun, does it?

Look, this sentence is clearly an outrage and something has to be done to get these young women out. That being said, once they're back on American soil someone needs to slap these bitches silly. There are conflicting accounts of the circumstances of their arrest. They were, at the very least, tempting fate by being right on the North Korean border - and they may very well have entered North Korea and defied orders to stop filming. It doesn't matter which account is true. American journalists - particularly young American female journalists - should know better than to play with fire like that. These women should never have been so close to the border without their own security escorts. And if they did purposely cross the border and defy orders to stop filming? Then we're inching closer to being in the territory of you get what you ask for.

Our government has better things to be negotiating with North Korea about right now - and much more important demands need to be made of them - than to have to give up some bargaining chips in order to get two female journalists out of a prison camp. And lest anyone believe we're going to get any international backup on this (aside from Nicolas Sarkozy's willingess to sit on Barack Obama's lap and lick his face while the negotiations go on) we'd better think again. The only two countries who can issue and kind of sanctions that would make a dent in North Korea are Russia and China, and neither of those nations views the individual rights of two young journalists the same way we Americans do.

Yeah, the sentence was too harsh. And if North Korea kidnapped two journalists who weren't even on its territory and then put them on trial, something has to be done to stop that practice. But, whatever happened, these women are not blameless. And they've caused us a headache we didn't need.