Dictators in need of attention

Certainly the personal lives of American presidents have been occasionally splashed acoss the headlines, especially when moronic opposition leaders decide that offenses related to personal mistakes are what they will choose to impeach on, rather than their blatant disrespect of Constitutional government (of course, they'd have to censure themselves, too, if they went the second route).

But with dictators, especially, recently, Communist ones, it seems that they want the personal attention. Fidel Castro releases pictures of himself in a sickbed, ostensibly recovering, and sends letters filled with encouraging personal details to "his" people.

Kim Jong Il, however, is the true master of using his government to get attention. Enormous statues of him adorn public places. Whenever he decides that the rest of the world isn't freaking out over him enough, he threatens to blow something up. The rest of the world spoon-feeds him the attention he wants, by encouraging him with incentives to not split atoms. These incentives help him feed the people that are left behind by a command economy with insane military spending.

Communism is a sad thing for the people that it controls and a frustration for the leaders of the "free world", but it would help the people under it most if those leaders simply ignored it, did not send it their people's money via the UN, and let it collapse.