Nicholas Kristof is often misguided, but he is not often as blatantly dishonest as he is in Tuesday's column.

Here's a foreign affairs quiz:

(1) How many nuclear weapons did North Korea produce in Bill Clinton's eight years of office?

(2) How many nuclear weapons has it produced so far in President Bush's four years in office?

The answer to the first question, by all accounts, is zero. The answer to the second is fuzzier, but about six.

And it's all George W. Bush's fault, because we know that making nuclear weapons is easy. Much like baking a cake, it only takes a few minutes -- and they didn't even start buying the ingredients until that mean ol' Bush called them "evil."

If you want to, you can honestly criticize how the Bush administration has handled North Korea. You can whine and moan about bilateral versus multilateral talks.

But to pretend that North Korea was a blissful nation led by a benevolent leader while President Clinton was in office -- and suddenly changed when Bush was elected -- is the worst sort of dishonesty.

I've praised Kristof in the past for his occasional olive branch to America's religious conservatives, so my reaction to Kristof's columns isn't predetermined like my reaction to those by his K-named colleague pictured above. However, I'm having a hard time counting Kristof among those honest liberals when he turns out this sort of tripe.

Kristof isn't an idiot, but he plays on on the New York Times editorial page.