Wonder how the family will react to this, with them previously rooting for Trump and all? Must feel like a pretty sick moment for the most powerful man to throw them like expendable pawns.
I feel sorry for their son and the parents for their loss, of course. But I lost all respect for them after they blasted Obama, saying that he essentially didn't care enough to bring their son home. What a bunch of BS that is.
Trump tossing them to the side at the first opportunity? They got what they deserved in praising a con man. I have sympathy for the loss of their son, but not for them after Trump's comments.
People make mistakes in assigning culpability. Barack Obama used secretive means of diplomacy when such were more effective than bluster. Maybe the 44th President thought it wiser to go through such channels as the foreign ministries of China or Russia to get the fellow out of North Korea. There were few ways. North Korea has an odious regime whose leadership has no moral compass and yields to the demands of the rest of the world only when such is advantageous.
Does Hillary Clinton get Otto Warmbier out by trading some farm equipment for him? Perhaps -- but we will never know. Alternative fiction is nothing more than a
Gedankenexperiment. One problem is that Trump demonizes Barack Obama to this moment.
Otto Warmbier did a trivial act except by standards of the horrid regime of North Korea, which has its own standards of moral values. But his offense would be a capital crime in he DPRK for a subject of that monstrous tyranny. State propaganda is sacred in North Korea, never anything to be mocked or ridiculed even if by the standards of the rest of the world it is ludicrous. I would guess that even in China, North Korean propaganda is recognized for its intellectual emptiness and for its disregard for sensibilities elsewhere. Know well that China has an abominable record on human rights for what it does to ethnic and religious minorities who take their ethnicity and religion seriously. This said, replacement of the odd melding of absolute monarchy and Stalinism with a puppet regime of the people's Republic of China would be an improvement.
Otto Warmbier has demonstrated the hard way that visiting North Korea is a gross error.
