No, not me, but Kim Jong-il. Check out Peter Maass’s outstanding look at the Man, the Myth, and certainly the Legend in New York Times Magazine. It’s lengthy - 11 pages - but worth every minute of your time to read. Let me just give you a brief snippet below:
The Dear Leader’s political skills, underestimated by foreign observers until recently, are beginning to register now that he has begun meeting foreigners on a regular basis and now that his regime, along with Iran, is one of two surviving members of the ”axis of evil” proclaimed by President Bush. Albright’s delegation spent more than 12 hours with Kim over two days in October 2000, half of that time in negotiations and the other half at dinners and ceremonial functions. During one negotiating session, Kim was presented with a list of 14 technical questions related to his missile program; the Americans expected him to pass the list to advisers who would respond later. Instead, Kim went down the list, one question after another, and answered most of them himself.
Indeed, the Dear Leader, who turned 62 this year, knows quite a bit about the world around him. And after decades of being nearly clueless, the world around him is gradually getting to know the Dear Leader, too.
PS: Peter Maass also keeps his own weblog at PeterMaass.com, on which he was kind enough to give links to both this blog and Free North Korea - thanks!
