Obama: Sony ‘made a mistake,’ and N. Korea better watch out

POTUS

Two things are being reported out of the president’s last scheduled presser of the year this afternoon:

  1. Sony “made a mistake” in canceling “The Interview.”
  2. We’re gonna get even with North Korea.

The first point raises interesting questions, but I find myself focusing on the second one.

So… exactly how do we retaliate against North Korea for throwing a snit fit over a silly movie, and then creating cyber havoc with a large corporation’s virtual existence?

POTUS promises our response will be “proportional.” What’s proportional in this instance? Do we somehow sabotage Dear Leader’s favorite TV show? His country has no large, successful corporations that we can mess with, so what else is there?

It’s like the opposite of “What do you give the man who has everything?” In this case, it’s what do you do to a country where the people all starve, they lack electric lighting and the absolute ruler is so paranoid he wipes out his own relatives to hold on to power?

The president is headed for vacation in Hawaii, leaving the West Wing to ponder how to get back at the North Koreans. Why do I picture the guys in Animal House planning their big revenge at the homecoming parade?

Previous White Houses had to decide how to respond to Pearl Harbor, or the Berlin Wall. We have this….

 

8 thoughts on “Obama: Sony ‘made a mistake,’ and N. Korea better watch out”

  2. Ralph Hightower

    Obama was wrong to point out just Sony for cancelling the showing of The Interview. The day before Sony’s decisions, the major theater chains, AMC, Carmike, Regal, Cinemark decided to cancel their showing of the movie.

    Without those major chains, who is left to show The Interview? The Big Mo in Monetta? Those theater chains represent big money to Sony.

    Obama should have also called out the theater chains for cowardice. After all, Batman wasn’t cancelled after a lone “armed to the teeth” gunman shot up a movie theater in Colorado.

  4. Mike Cakora

    The NorKs may have been aided by any number of bad guys, nasty hackers are not hard to find in the Web’s underground. Might have been freelancers from Russia or within China, or maybe even China itself where they appear are getting ready to open a can of whupass on Japan. , so might as well cripple one of the Land of the Rising Sun’s premier companies. Nice Psyops, bringing down Sony as a taste of the vengeance China plans in return for the humiliation Japan administered in the 1930s and 1940s.

    But Obama’s a lawyer in addition to his day job and he had no business telling Sony how to manage its risk. A big part of Sony’s problem is not the NorKs, but us. We’ve created a society wherein if somebody gets hurt, anybody will be found to pay.

    Consider that Cinemark is still dealing with a lawsuit related to the mass shooting that happened at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Returns—a shooting for which there was no warning ahead of time, no reason to expect violence. There are trial lawyers out there who will sue whomever has the deepest pockets on whatever flimsy pretense they can muster because, hey, dolla dolla bill y’all!.

    This is also totally and completely bonkers.

    Think about this for a second. What we are saying—nay, what we have accepted, as a society—is a situation in which a totally blameless third party would be held responsible for the evil committed by an irresponsible actor. Sony and the theater chains are being punished for the mere potential of a terror attack against them.

    Obama knows this, or should, since his party is the protector, defender, benefactor, and beneficiary of those who use the legal system to extract outsize awards from, in many cases, bystanders who happen to have more bucks than most.

    What appears to have started this all off, other than maybe a grudge against Japan in general, is the plot line of a simplistic movie in which the NorKs’ glorious leader is made fun of and assassinated. It’s likely that this glorious leader did indeed play a role, if only to shout metaphorically, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

    The Wall Street Journal offers the solution Obama should have taken: Pay Sony the $44M the flick cost and get all rights to it, then put it into the public domain to let everyone watch it for free. Want to get it into North Korea? From the Journal:

    Park Sang Hak, a North Korean defector now living in the South, has an idea. Mr. Park, whom we profiled last year, puts information about the outside world along with movies and television programs on USB drives, which he floats into the North on balloons. The Kim Jong Un regime has labeled him “enemy zero” and sent an assassin to kill him with a poison-tipped pen. For real.

    Mr. Park wants to include “The Interview” on future balloon launches.

    Not perfect, but close enough.

  5. Bart

    Depending on where your sources of information come from, according to the theater chains, they “delayed” showing the movie, not cancelling it. Regal had not decided to cancel showing the movie until Sony decided to withdraw it from the market.

    My question is this. The reaction over NK’s threats led to cancelling the showing of the movie for now seems to show a sense of outrage from Hollywood, the president, and politicians. NK is a small country with a total nut case ruling it with an iron hand. Threats were made against Sony employees and whoever assisted NK in hacking Sony published names and critical information about their employees, even to the point of threats against them and their families. When the movie was pulled, everyone was in an uproar about the decision and are pushing for Sony to release the movie if just on the internet. George Clooney tried to get a petition going to denounce the cancellation of the movie but no one would sign it. Remember, NK is an easy target and according to most, not much of a real threat. But, when the ruler is a total whack job, who knows what he is actually willing to do? Would any of you be willing to take the chance that he wouldn’t actually carry out the threats? Would you willingly expose your family to potential harm over a movie?

    On the other hand, a really bad movie about 10 minutes long was made about Mohammed and it was used as the reason Muslims were demonstrating in the ME and for the attack on the Benghazi compound. How many of the same people condemning Sony and the theater chains stepped up and supported the maker of the bad piece of “cinema” about Mohammed? Did they come to his defense? Would they be willing to make a movie critical of Islam? Seriously doubt it.

    The two may not be the same but the principle is.

  6. Bart

    One more point. The man behind the Mohammed movie was investigated and finally ended up in prison. A shady character and a bad film maker.

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