The Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley," which means that you can plan all you like, but what happens next can still blow up in your face. The sentiment is as true today as when Burns wrote it more than 200 years ago.

At some point during 2014, a deep thinker at Sony Pictures in the United States decided to make a motion picture, the central theme of which was a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jung-un. On the face of it, this seems a particularly dumb idea to begin with and certainly not anything that might be considered one of the best-laid plans. After all, whether you like him or not, Kim is the leader of a country, and postulating the murder of someone like him is - while perhaps not an original plot for a movie - probably a repugnant idea on several levels. If the roles were reversed and the North Koreans were making a movie about killing President Obama, I suspect the American public, particularly the Democrats, would be outraged. For purposes of keeping track, let's call this mistake number one. Not content with simply that level of insult, however, Sony's film was a comedy. Mistake number two. If the North Korean leadership was somewhat miffed by this attempt at humor, I expect they had a right to be.

So let's agree that a comedy about killing Kim was somewhat less than a great idea. What happened next compounded the problem immensely.

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