STAY TUNED: Numerous U.S. Media Outlets Reporting that Kim Jong Un is in ‘Vegetative’ State.
TMZ is going with the headline, “N. Korea Dictator Kim Jong-un Reportedly Dead After Botched Heart Surgery.” But as NRO’s Dan McLaughlin tweets, “TMZ is rarely wrong about these things, but my guess is that its sources in Pyongyang are not on par with its sources in the LAPD.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Is he alive? Is he dead? For the moment, I’m calling him Schrodinger’s Dictator.
UPDATE (From Ed): America’s Newspaper of Record weighs in on the current state of the big man: North Korea Reports Kim Jong Un Is ‘Most Alive Person In Universe.’
That news conflicts with reports from another great parody news account, DPRK News:
As Glenn said, he really is Schrodinger’s Dictator right now.
The news stories that were published yesterday featured these speculative details: Kim Jong Un in ‘vegetative state’, Japanese media claims; China medical experts dispatched to North Korea.
“Japanese magazine Shukan Gendai reported that Kim collapsed during a visit to a rural area in April. Kim reportedly required a stent procedure following the incident. Shukan Gendai subsequently detailed how the surgeon in charge of Kim’s operation was not used to dealing with obese patients and was too nervous during the operation, leading to delays that left Kim in a ‘vegetative state.’”
How nervous? “Other unconfirmed reports, attributed to senior party sources in Beijing, said an operation to insert a stent went wrong because the surgeon’s hands were shaking so badly,” the New York Post adds.
Shades of the scene in The Death of Stalin when they Politburo couldn’t find any competent doctors to revive Stalin – because Stalin had recently had all the good doctors rounded up and shot during his “Doctors’ Plot” purge.