Totally misses the point.<p>Kim jong il was good at being an evil dicator. But that doesn't make him any less crazy. For example, once there was a German rabbit breeder who was able to breed rabbits the size of dogs. KJI heard about it and decided they were the answer to his countries hunger problems. The breeder tried in vane to convince the leader that it was a terrible idea because the rabbits ate way to much for this to be feasible.<p>Trying to use giant rabbits to solve a famine is insanity.
Overly generous. You might be good at holding onto power and convincing your long-suffering people that they really have never had it better.<p>So he's good at holding other peaceful countries like Japan and South Korea to ransom because they don't want to get into a fight. So far, so dictator, but I don't really accept the hypothesis that this means he wasn't crazy.<p>Something I read in another report which I thought was hiliarious:
"Official accounts attributed his demise to mental and physical exhaustion while riding on a train" - imagine how much exhaustion the Koreans pushing the train felt.<p>The guy was a nutcase, if measured on any normal scale. He was willing to let his people starve in order to live like a medieval king. If he's so well educated and read, then he knew what he was doing.
Outfoxed? When one "outfoxes" another, there is a general implication of success. Kim Jon Il did not achieve success. The rebuttal to this is that he remained in power. However, to remain the captain of a ship that sinks to the bottom of the sea under your guidance is not a success, but a failure.