Who’s calling whom ‘madcap’?

The race-baiting, personal insults and political provocations come almost daily, but not from any cutthroat comedian’s stand-up routine.

Rather, they’re bulletins from the Korean Central News Agency, the official North Korean government mouthpiece.

In the studied bombast of the KCNA, U.S. officials have long been deemed capitalistic “running dogs,” “jackals” and “warmongers” and the Japanese decried as “reactionaries” and “militarist maniacs.”

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, a favorite target of late, is mocked as a “stooge” and “lackey” whose “puppet forces” and “gang of traitors” will soon be decimated.

Contrast that with the poetic prose applied to Kim Jong Il, the beloved “Great Leader,” who is lauded by KCNA as a “great statesman” and “peerlessly brilliant commander.”

Much like Kim’s awkward personal style -- his bouffant hairdo and array of oversize, Liberace-style sunglasses -- KCNA’s releases, in Korean and English, are often lampooned by foreigners.

But North Korea watchers say the level of KCNA rhetoric offers a valuable insight to what the secretive government might be thinking, and where it may be headed.

Provocative actions such as the recent nuclear test and missile launches, for example, are signaled in advance by a harsher tone.

“There is no better window into North Korean perceptions, policies and plans for the future than what appears in the state media,” said Robert Carlin, a former State Department analyst who once interpreted North Korea news media reports. “It’s a reflection over time of what signals Pyongyang is sending to its friends, enemies and its own people.”

Each day, KCNA carries government policy statements, strategy essays translated from state radio and the party daily as well as those roundhouse verbal punches the regime aims at its enemies.

A recent KCNA release about U.S. attempts to impose sanctions against North Korea, for example, was not encouraging, ending with a warning that “the situation is inching close to the brink of war due to the brigandish moves of the U.S.”

Trying to figure out Pyongyang’s next move involves monitoring what the government tells its people and its shifting stances toward its foes.

Still, analysts say, no North Korea tea-leaf reading is foolproof. The U.S. can only guess Pyongyang’s next move in its nuclear buildup.

“What is North Korea going to do next? That was always the most difficult thing to answer,” Carlin said. “Particular words don’t tell you all that much. But in aggregate, you can watch the rising and falling tone and make educated guesses.”

North Korea announced the election of Barack Obama in neutral terms, even communicating an offer -- rebuffed by the administration -- to send an envoy to the inauguration.

Perhaps sensing that President Obama would pay the regime little more diplomatic attention than his predecessor did, Pyongyang slowly changed its tone toward him.

Suddenly, the “hostile” Obama administration was engaged in “huge spending for smear broadcasting.” Although the new administration “put up the signboard of ‘change’ and ‘multilateral cooperation diplomacy,’ it is, in essence, pursuing a unilateral policy little different from the Bush administration’s,” KCNA declared.

Still, North Korea has yet to vilify Obama as it did George W. Bush, whose administration was dismissed as “arrogant, self-justified and highhanded.” Under Bush, the U.S. was “a rogue, a gangster of the world community” as its forces continued their “madcap military ruckus.”

If Pyongyang begins “to ratchet up the language to include personal attacks [against Obama], that would tell us something,” Carlin said. “It would reflect a policy direction.”

Whether the KCNA reports are aimed at Bush or Obama, the tone remains vintage Cold War.

“It’s partially influenced by Russia and China, a strategy that’s a holdover from the Stalinist era,” said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert and political scientist at Kookmin University in Seoul.

“It’s a language of extremes, but the most notable quality is its rudeness. North Korea is portrayed as a shining land of plenty while foreign enemies are dirty, stingy, wolf-like, inhuman creatures.”

The barbs often read like schoolyard taunts by a somewhat poetic bully, such as the recent release that termed “provocations” against Pyongyang “as foolish an act as jumping into fire with brushwood on one’s back.”

Pyongyang’s diatribes have inspired a satiric website, NK News, which tracks the colorful vocabulary. It bills itself as a “database of North Korean propaganda,” and includes a “random insult generator.”

On a page featuring an animated likeness of Kim from the 2004 movie spoof “Team America: World Police,” visitors click on an icon labeled “Insult me again” to see aspersions said to be taken from KCNA, including “You arrogant gangster!” and “You anti-socialist traitor!”

But not all KCNA releases are bombastic. Many contain carefully worded language that affords the regime political wiggle room.

In a recent statement about North Korea’s possible voiding of the armistice signed with South Korea in 1953 that ended the fighting in the Korean War, Pyongyang qualified its rejection, saying that “at present” it could not guarantee peace.

According to a former North Korean journalist, KCNA writers “never think their expressions are too extreme.

“They believe that media reports should be aired worldwide with a stiff and strong revolutionary voice for the sake of socialism,” said Chang Hae-song, 65, a former reporter for state-run TV. “It is not like sleepy voices from South Korean news services.”

Chang, who worked in the North Korean news media for 20 years until defecting in 1996, was once part of the political propaganda team of a TV station.

“We wrote the scripts on our own, but we were given the policies of Kim Jong Il and knew that we had to follow his orders,” he said. “We did what we were told to do.”

Mostly the job was the same: Insult Washington and Seoul.

Chang said that former North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il’s late father, once described South Korean broadcasters as too soft, like “a woman who is trying to seduce a man.”

“He said our broadcasts should never be like that,” Chang said. “We should be full of enthusiasm and ambition.”

Brian Myers, a North Korea propaganda expert and professor at Dongseo University in Busan, said KCNA ratcheted up its attacks after South Korean President Lee, a hard-liner on Pyongyang, was elected in late 2007.

The vitriol against Lee is even harsher within North Korea, where there are regular death threats and claims that his “days are numbered,” Myers said.

Although KCNA journalists are trained at Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung University, Myers said, their English is often clumsy because they come in contact with so few Westerners.

Still, he said, the releases are crucial to understanding North Korea.

“We have treated North Korean culture as one big joke, and then we wonder why the place is so baffling,” Myers said. “We have to look seriously at their mind-set. It’s the only way to understand why they continue to behave like no Cold War adversary we ever had in the Eastern Bloc.”

In the end, KCNA employs singularly audacious language.

A recent warning to Seoul contained its typical saber-rattling: “The puppet authorities had better bear in mind that [our] advanced preemptive strike . . . will reduce everything . . . to debris, not just fire.”

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john.glionna@latimes.com

Ju-min Park of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.