Robert Gates Needs a Geography Lesson

There's a report today that the North Koreans are planning to launch a missile toward Hawaii:

North Korea may fire a long-range ballistic missile toward Hawaii in early July, the Associated Press quoted a Japanese news report on Thursday. U.S. military experts do not believe the North Korean missile has the range to strike U.S. territory, but that the threat in the near future is real.

To be honest, I don't really think the North Koreans are a threat to attack Hawaii. Mostly, Kim Jong-il wants to draw Barack Obama into a game of homoerotic mutual denunciations that would allow Kim to feel like a real man and a real leader.

God, Kim misses George Bush.

But whether the North Koreans are a threat or not, I'm much more disturbed that our Defense Secretary Robert Gates doesn't seem to know which direction the North Koreans would have to fire if they did attack Hawaii.

The United States has positioned more missile defenses around Hawaii as a precaution against a possible North Korean launch across the Pacific, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday. "We do have some concerns if they were to launch a missile to the west in the direction of Hawaii," Gates said.

It's East Robert, East. Hawaii is east of North Korea. If the North Koreans fire their missiles west, it's somebody else's problem.