The Likely Dates of Any Trump Attack on North Korea: January 15 or October 15.

Thinking how Trump thinks, he will likely attack North Korea in either mid-January (far enough from the November elections so that he has a chance to recover from any catastrophe) or as an October surprise (if he's about to lose Congress, what does he have to lose?).

Anticipating this, it's surprising activists aren't in the streets preemptively protesting the attack being considered (which would trigger a retaliatory missile strike from the DPRK that would, at the very least, evaporate Seoul, or, at worst, cost us an American city, probably Washington D.C.).

Tens of millions dead on the horizon. The human mind cannot grasp such a holocaust, so let's just focus on Louis C.K.'s penis, its dimensions and what he once did with it. That's the sort of thing the human mind can handle.

Here's hoping the winds blow the radiation cloud east, over the Atlantic, instead of into population centers. Radiation sickness is a bitch -- and there are not enough hospitals or doctors in the middle Atlantic region to help even a small percentage of the sick if D.C. were hit.

(But let's get back to real news: was smoochy's smooch consensual or not?)

James Mattis and H.R. McMaster, cheered on by Mike Pompeo and Sen. Lindsey Graham, are talking themselves into believing a hit on North Korea is doable. They're war-gaming a so-called "bloody nose" strategy. They are about to make the biggest mistake in American history.

If it goes south, I can hear their spin: It's Obama's fault, they'll say; why didn't he take care of the threat when Kim Jong-un was non-nuclear? Would you rather have waited until Kim had anthrax on his ICBM?, they’ll say. And forty percent of Americans — Trump’s base — will likely go with that line.

The loss of a major U.S. city for the first time in history. We wouldn't recover from that in anybody's current lifetime. Just sadness for the remainder.

What’s the wisest way to handle North Korea? Simply accept the fact that Kim has nukes. We'll have to live with it until time itself creates a more reasonable regime in Pyongyang.

Stalin had nukes. Mao had nukes. The neo-Islamists in Pakistan have over a hundred. We and our allies live with that reality every day. Well, here's a new harsh fact we have to live with: the DPRK is now a nuclear power.

Remember that Kim is bound by the same dynamic of mutually-assured destruction that has stopped every despot since the 1940s from launching a strike.

Yes, it is an unfortunate coincidence of history that North Korea has put a miniaturized nuke on a missile at the same time that the U.S. has put a miniaturized brain in the Oval Office.