ZCZC
BFF-12
NKOREA-US-DIPLOMACY-POLITICS-BIDEN
North Korea calls Biden ‘rabid dog’ that ‘must be beaten to death’
SEOUL, Nov 15, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – North Korea has launched a visceral
diatribe against US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, calling the
former vice-president a “rabid dog” — while also borrowing the terminology
of Donald Trump.
Pyongyang is renowned for its vitriol, but the verbal deluge was unusually
ferocious even by its own standards.
Biden “had the temerity to dare slander the dignity of the supreme
leadership of the DPRK”, the North’s official KCNA news agency said late
Thursday, referring to the country by its official name.
“Rabid dogs like Biden can hurt lots of people if they are allowed to run
about,” it went on. “They must be beaten to death with a stick.
“Doing so will be beneficial for the US also,” it added.
It was not immediately clear what had provoked Pyongyang’s ire, but Biden’s
campaign released an ad this week condemning Trump’s foreign policy, saying
that “dictators and tyrants are praised, our allies pushed aside”.
The voiceover says the word “tyrants” at the exact moment a picture appears
of US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un shaking
hands at their Singapore summit last year.
KCNA appeared to cite one of Trump’s favoured insults for the candidate —
“Sleepy Joe” — when it said Americans called him “Biden not awakened from a
sleep”.
Biden had shown “a sign of the final stage of dementia”, KCNA added. “It
seems time has come for him to depart his life.”
KCNA misspelled the candidate’s name as “Baiden” throughout, seemingly
reflecting the spelling used in the Korean alphabet.
It is not the first time the North has condemned Biden. In May it called
him an “imbecile” and a “fool of low IQ” days after he called Kim a
“dictator” and “tyrant”.
The rhetoric underscores its “impatience” with any criticism of Kim, said
Cheong Seong-Chang, a senior researcher at the private Sejong Institute.
“Pyongyang has always loathed hearing its leadership labelled as tyrant or
dictator by the outside world,” he said.
The invective against Biden was “pretty high on the scale”, North Korean
propaganda specialist Mason Richey of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
told AFP, highlighting the multiple repetitions of the “beating the dog”
trope.
Trump himself has also been the target of Pyongyang’s anger at times.
In 2017 the two leaders traded personal insults and threats of war before
the diplomatic rapprochement that has seen them meet three times and Trump
repeatedly proclaim their personal friendship, although nuclear negotiations
remain deadlocked.
As tensions mounted, Kim called Trump a “mentally deranged US dotard” whom
he would “tame with fire”, while KCNA also branded him a “rabid dog”.
KCNA used the same Korean word previously translated as “dotard” in its
article Thursday, although the epithet did not appear in the official English
version.
BSS/AFP/GMR/0901 hrs