The press coverage lavished on the every theatrical ranting of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un and his propaganda machine is rapidly becoming ridiculous.

Reports The Telegraph:

That American pledge to defend South Korea and Japan is crucial to deterring the North from full-scale war. “Kim Jong-un has to understand, as I think he probably does, what the outcome of conflict would be,” said Mr Kerry.

“I think we have lowered our rhetoric significantly and we are attempting to find a way for reasonableness to prevail here,” he added. “The rhetoric that we are hearing from North Korea is simply unacceptable by any standards.”

The North voiced yet more belligerence on Friday, turning its venom on Japan, saying: “If Japan makes a slightest move, the spark of war will touch Japan first.” The statement added that “Japan must come to its senses” or else Tokyo would be “consumed in nuclear flames”.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kim Jong-Un is a pudgy, spoiled little tinpot dictator, presiding over a desperately poor nation and an army which, while large in size, is comically antiquated and under-equipped, and not at all prepared for significant combat.

Like most rational people, Kim and the senior officials around him who pull the strings, do not have a death wish, and are not about to launch a nuclear strike against anyone, with very low chance of success but the certainty of total destruction in retaliation.

It should be obvious to a small child that Kim Jong-Un is sabre-rattling (if I hear the term “bellicose rhetoric” one more time on the news, or read it in print, I think I will go mad) purely to shore up his authority and support at home. Given the fact that none of the poor enslaved citizens of North Korea will ever see the stern-faced responses that our own leaders somehow feel compelled to give every time their babyfaced dictator throws one of his tantrums, we have to ask ourselves why do John Kerry and William Hague (and countless other military and diplomatic officials) feel the need to respond publicly when those responses will be seen only by their domestic audiences?

And incidentally the people at Fox News, who have been covering the latest tensions with great glee as another “Obama foreign policy crisis” would do well to discover some humility and remember that it was their beloved president, George W. Bush, who allowed North Korea to go nuclear in the first place.

That is all.