BILL FRIST, HUMANITARIAN

Courtesy Instapundit comes this story detailing how SML Sen. Bill Frist helped some victims of an auto accident in Florida today:

Incoming Senate majority leader Bill Frist, a surgeon, helped tend to six victims of a rollover accident on a Florida highway New Year's Day, earning praise from paramedics for stabilizing some of the four survivors.

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An Isuzu Rodeo with six people aboard was heading west on Alligator Alley when it rolled over 3 to 4 miles west of the toll plaza in Broward County at 3:51 p.m., Broward Fire-Rescue Assistant Chief Todd Leduc said.

All six, including three children, were thrown out as the vehicle rolled. A 10-year-old boy died on the scene; another passenger died later at a hospital.

Frist, 50, was driving east on the highway, the Everglades portion of Interstate 75, heading to a family vacation home in Fort Lauderdale with his two sons when he came across the accident minutes after it happened.

He stopped and went to work checking the victims. When paramedics arrived, he pointed them to the ones in the most severe condition. Frist helped paramedics and several off-duty firefighters stabilize the victims until they were transported to area hospital after about 30 minutes.

"Senator Frist greatly assisted Broward County Fire Rescue. The Senate majority leader was really instrumental in helping us treat the victims," Leduc said. "We'd like to get in contact with him and recognize him for his efforts."

Let's put that story together with this one, detailing Frist's charity work with AIDS patients in Africa over the past few years. Seems like a great guy, doesn't he?

That won't stop the likes of Josh Marshall from trying to demonize him. But keep these stories in mind next time you hear some Democrat call him a racist.

Speaking of Marshall, he's posted more about North Korea. It's another fact-free post, using a Newsweek foreign affairs correspondent to justify his own anti-Bush spin on the situation. That reporter is Roy Guttman, who in an interview with CNN's Miles O'Brien mind-reads his way through assessing what went wrong with Pyongyang:

O'BRIEN: All right, some softening statements from the administration over the weekend. Secretary of State Powell saying, we don't want to call these negotiations, but talks. There's a lot of deciphering of the language here and maybe you can help us walk down that road. Why are they so circumspect?
GUTMAN: Well, the administration has had a very hard line approach to North Korea almost from the moment it took office. It decided not to pursue the Clinton administration's approach, which was essentially to buy off North Korea off of its nuclear ambitions, off of its missile export ambitions, and for months and months, until the middle of last year, they could not decide really how to deal with them, but they're preparing to take a hardline, then they decided late last year or the middle of last year to go back to some kind of negotiations, but it never really got started until this summer.

And I think the North Koreans realized or decided at a certain point that after they were included in the "axis of evil" and after the administration did drag its feet for a rather long time, that they were going to up the stakes and raise the ante, and now the administration finds itself in something of a crisis. (italics mine)

What is Guttman basing his assessment on? His own intuition, nothing more. North Korea has upped the stakes only after being forced to admit that it was cheating on the 1994 Agreed Framework, and had begun doing so before the ink on that agreement had even dried. The situation the Korean Peninsula finds itself in today is very much a product of Clinton-era foreign policy naivete in trying to buy off a mad dictator. Marshall promises more posts on this topic soon. Let's hope these future posts include more than just regurgitating other reporters' opinions.