You may not be familiar with Foreign Policy magazine or its CEO and editor-at-large, but on Thursday, David Rothkopf published an op-ed at Philly.com with the following headline:

Mitch McConnell's No Kim Jong Un, But He's More Dangerous to America

After some discussion about current tensions with North Korea, Rothkopf wrote:

But Kim Jong Un is no Mitch McConnell. Because Kim, even with his nuclear weapons, is hardly likely to launch an attack on Americans anywhere given that the response would produce the instant and certain obliteration of his regime. What that means is that for all his bluster, the chubby little autocrat is very unlikely to cost one American his life. But in vowing to block any vote on even the most modest legislation to rein in America's out-of-control gun culture, the Senate minority leader all but guarantees that the toll in America's street-corner war will continue to rise.

Let's put the threats in perspective. More people die from gun violence in the United States every 15 months than died in the Korean War. More people die daily in homicides using guns in the United States than combatants died each day in the Vietnam War. This is why, perhaps, while a recent Gallup poll shows that only 55 percent of Americans favor aiding treaty ally South Korea should North Korea attack, 90 percent of Americans think that their country should make it harder for people to buy a gun in the United States through means such as background checks.

While cable news networks play up the danger associated with Kim's mugging for the cameras, they treat more or less as business as usual McConnell's political maneuvering to not only block any progress on reform, but actually deny the victims of tragedies such as Newtown and Aurora the opportunity to see a vote on the Senate floor.

Such is the state of political discourse in the nation today.

Sickening, isn't it?

(HT NB reader Samuel Ogundipe)