It must be nice to have a lot of colorful details at hand whenyou're writing a profile of a figure in the news, like Evan Thomas over at Newsweek. What's great about this insightful look into the world of North Korea's "Dear Leader" is how the reporter's commitment our being totally informed about the really important stuff shows in nearly every paragraph. Like "Since Kim is an absolute ruler, he can put on any show and act in any role he wants. A well-rounded 5 feet 3, he cuts a slightly ridiculous figure dressed in a Mao suit, wearing high-heeled shoes and sporting a pouffy bouffant hairdo."

Lest we think Thomas is making a funny, he goes on to warn us: "It is all a grotesque charade. His fantasyland is a charnel house." Thomas's masterful turn away from the comedy of Kim Jong Il's appearance is lent urgency when he brings to our attention the perhaps under-appreciated reasons why this funny story is actually, folks, kinda scary: "Kim Jong Il’s North Korean horror movie would all be a remote tragedy to the out-side world, except that Kim’s props now include weapons of mass destruction—chemical and biological and, soon if not already, nuclear weapons. Kim is threatening to use them against his neighbors and the United States, or to sell them to terrorists who would love nothing better than to contaminate or incinerate Times Square or the White House."

It's that phrase "who would love nothing better" that lets us know we've gone beyond the hard-hitting facteroonies that characterize the rest of the piece and into a journalistic place that's really superior to the world of facts -- the more satisfying realm of received wisdom, rock-solid cliche, and simple, memorable narratives into which the complexities of fact can be conveniently stuffed and stored. One begins to suspect Thomas is working for the administration -- certainly he's got the requisite disinterest in actual complex international issues, and a knack for sniffing out the terrorists lurking behind those complexities.

Here's the thing: Surely we all know that Kim Jong Il is without question a tyrant, a murderer, a threat to world peace, a screwball and a plague on the people of North Korea. I don't need convincing of that, and I suspect Thomas's readers don't either. The fact that Thomas is spouting second-hand stories of Let-them-Eat-Cake decadence, or lampooning the dictator with all the subtlety of one of H. Stern's sidekicks is not all that objectionable. The fact that he's selling this comfortingly "revealing" pap as "news" -- to an audience that could stand to get a lot more information about why, for example, the world has pretty much allowed this guy to starve millions of his people to death for years -- is what burns.

You may now begin laughing at me for imagining I was going to find something less inane at the MSNBC/Newsweek site. But hell, Arts and Letters Daily linked to it!