First off — it’s great that Laura Ling and Euna Lee got home safe. Lucky them. It’s not an exaggeration to say that they escaped a fate just as horrible as those faced by the victims of Hitler’s concentration camps.

It pretty much looks like a win-win situation. Two big dummies got themselves in more trouble they deserved, but Our Hero flies in and saves the day. I’m sure Kim Jong Il is patting himself on the back for the all-important ego stroke he got from getting Bill Clinton to come over and suck up to him. And luckily for us the North Korean leader is so self-obsessed that he’ll never realize that the West doesn’t give a crap about the all-important concept of saving face and subtly leveraging symbolic importance over others. Kiss for the cameras, hooray, nobody dies. (At least, the Americans don’t die. Nobody’s talking about all the North Koreans still in those awful camps.)

It’s hard for me to see this as some kind of amazing victory, because I can’t figure why Ling and Lee were in North Korea in the first place. The kind of reporting they were doing — creeping over the Chinese border with a camera — is unlikely to produce anything spectacular. The expedition is extra high on the Not Worth It Meter when you factor in the consequences of getting caught. And I’ll hazard a guess that neither Ling nor Lee had brushed up on their black ops training, so that risk was pretty high.

Both of these women have husbands. Lee has a daughter. But they intruded on a country that (a) is run by a psychopath and (b) doesn’t treat intruders well. (Read: tortures and executes them.) What were these chicks thinking? If they want to go for the Darwin Award by playing Intrepid Girl Reporter in a country that Navy Seals would be nervous to visit, great. But you don’t exactly win Wife and Mother of the Year (let alone a Pulitzer) by doing something so stupid and dangerous. It’s no surprise they got caught and handed a stiff sentence by a kangaroo court. It’s North Korea. Duh. The real wonder is that they were lucky enough to get bailed out. Boy are they lucky Kim Jong Il’s stroke didn’t affect the part of his brain that contains his massive ego, and the only price for parole was a charming song and dance from President Clinton. This wasn’t really a win; just looks like Ling and Lee’s epic fail (luckily) failed.

Next time, geniuses, stick to somewhere safer, like Detroit or Baghdad. Or just realize that you’re gonna die and it will be your own fault. Because I’m guessing private plane rescues from heads of state are kind of a one-time deal.

< / cynicism >