SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea described President Bush Monday as a tyrannical political imbecile who put Adolf Hitler in the shade and said Pyongyang could see no justification for talks with his administration.
Six-party working-level talks on the communist North's nuclear weapons ambitions had been planned for August but have yet to materialize.
The September date for more senior talks is also in question, although diplomats note Pyongyang often raises its rhetorical voice before attending talks or compromising.
South Korea's foreign ministry said Monday its top nuclear negotiators would visit Beijing and Tokyo this week for consultations aimed at restarting the main talks.
In a strongly worded statement published by the official KCNA news agency, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said Bush had hurled "malignant slanders and calumnies" against Pyongyang's leadership under Kim Jong-il.
"This clearly proves that the DPRK was quite right when it commented that he is a political imbecile bereft of even elementary morality as a human being and a bad guy, much less being a politician," the spokesman said. "Bush is a tyrant that puts Hitler into the shade."
DPRK is short for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Bush said in a presidential election campaign speech last Wednesday in Hudson, Wisconsin, he had made the decision to bring in other countries to help persuade the North to disarm.
"NO" COULD STILL MEAN "YES"
"I felt it was important to bring other countries into the mix, like China and Japan and South Korea and Russia, so there's now five countries saying to the tyrant in North Korea, disarm, disarm," he said.
The North Korean spokesman said it had been impossible to hold working-level talks between the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States because of what he called hostile U.S. policy.
