N. Korea lashes out at 'philistine' Bush

WASHINGTON — North Korea lashed out at President Bush Saturday for comments he made about the country's leader, Kim Jong Il, at a news conference Thursday, asserting that the North Korean nuclear crisis will never be resolved while Bush remains in office.

Bush is "a half-baked man in terms of morality and a philistine whom we can never deal with," a Foreign Ministry spokesman said, according to the official Korean Central News Agency. The statement described Bush as the "world's dictator" who as president had "turned the world into a sea of blood."

North Korea declared in February that it had produced nuclear weapons and refused to return to six-nation disarmament talks. Saturday's statement appears to signal the end of that diplomatic process, heightening the stakes in the impasse. The Bush administration has warned Asian allies in the past week that satellite images suggest North Korea is preparing its first underground nuclear test.

"We can no longer tolerate and wait for a shift in the (U.S.) policy," the North Korean statement concluded. "Quite just is the path chosen by us, and we will proceed straight and square along that path."

The Bush administration has engaged in an intensive effort to persuade North Korea to return to the talks, with a senior envoy shuttling among Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul last week. Bush took State Department officials and foreign diplomats by surprise with unusually strong language at the televised news conference, calling Kim a "tyrant" and a "dangerous person" who ran "concentration camps."

Kim is considered almost a deity in his country, and the North Korean statement said it could not ignore such "slandering and cursing remarks." The statement noted that "no one can expect to hear reasonable words from Bush, once a cowboy at a ranch in Texas. His remarks often stun audiences as they reveal his utter ignorance."

Bush had never made such cutting remarks about Kim in such a high-profile setting, though he occasionally referred to Kim as a tyrant while on the campaign trail last year. He was quoted in Bob Woodward's 2002 book "Bush at War" as saying he loathed Kim because "he is starving his people."

Administration officials have declined to explain the president's remarks. "The president said what he had to say about Kim Jong Il and his regime, plain and simple in his plain-spoken way," one official said.