Yesterday, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid and others decided that the blame for the fact that an evil, egotistical dictator had (apparently) detonated a nuclear bomb belonged to President George W. Bush -- instead of the aforementioned evil, egotistical dictator.

Today, Sen. John McCain fired back.

"I would remind Senator (Hillary) Clinton and other Democrats critical of the Bush administration's policies that the framework agreement her husband's administration negotiated was a failure," McCain said at a news conference after a campaign appearance for Republican Senate candidate Mike Bouchard.

"The Koreans received millions and millions in energy assistance. They've diverted millions of dollars of food assistance to their military," he said.

Which laughably provoked this response from Sen. Clinton's spokesman.

"Now is not the time to play politics of the most dangerous kind - with our policy on North Korea," Philippe Reines, spokesman for Clinton, said in a statement.

Maybe your boss should've taken that advice before she opened her trap.

The fact is, that about the only thing the U.S. can do to rein in North Korea is to scare the Chinese into cracking down on their puppet state madman. How to do that? Get South Korea and Japan to build modest nuclear arsenals. Of course, that would never happen until those two nations felt sufficiently threatened by a nuclear North Korea.

Sometimes there's little you can do when an evil madman is determined to go nuclear.

Democrats would be much better off launching their verbal barbs at Kim Jong Il instead of President Bush.