Could you imagine an odder couple? The cross-dressing, body-piercing "bad boy" of basketball sitting with a boy dictator who rides astride a renegade nuclear weapons state. Indeed, just weeks before the bizarre piece of basketball diplomacy, which saw Rodman watch an exhibition game featuring a few Harlem Globetrotters players and spend two days palling around with Kim in Pyongyang, North Korean state propaganda broadcastthreatening video images of U.S. President Barack Obama in flames and an American city under attack.

Even more disturbing is the spectacle that the North Korea story has become. Watching George Stephanopoulos's efforts to lambast Rodman for his declarations of friendship with Kim during a nationally televised interview on Sunday, I could not tell whether this was real news or a Saturday Night Live routine -- the North Korea story has become a caricature of itself. Before Rodman, it was Google chairman Eric Schmidt; then it was the New York Philharmonic;