North Korea’s government hauled out some unusual insults Friday to denounce U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner after the Colorado Republican called Kim Jong Un, the country’s young dictator, a “whack job” and a “crazed maniac” amid heightening nuclear tensions.

Calling Gardner “a man mixed in with human dirt … who has lost basic judgment and body hair,” a spokesman for Pyongyang’s foreign ministry said the senator had “perpetrated wicked blasphemy against our supreme dignity,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported.

“For a psychopath like the [expletive] Gardner to hurl evil accusations at our highest dignity is a serious provocation,” the North Korean spokesman said, according to a translation by UPI’s Elizabeth Shim. (Shim told The Daily Caller that the expletive used to describe Gardner is “one of the worst.”)

Gardner’s words “could only spell misfortune for the United States,” the North Korean spokesman added.

Gardner said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show that it would be “unacceptable” for President Donald Trump to meet with the North Korean dictator, as the president suggested he’d be happy to do earlier in the week, until Kim complied with promises the regime has made for decades.

Gardner chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Policy.

In an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” that aired Sunday, Trump called Kim “a pretty smart cookie” and sounded impressed that he’d consolidated control of the communist country “at a very young age.”

“If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it,” Trump told Bloomberg News on Monday.

Gardner told the MSNBC hosts that he thinks “most people agree that Kim Jong Un is a whack job” and  called it a “bad idea” to engage in direct talks with him under present conditions. “This is a rogue regime, a madman in Pyongyang,” Gardner added.

Gardner brushed off a suggestion by an MSNBC host that Trump might be engaging in strategic diplomacy by trying to flatter the dictator.

“This guy is willing to use and threaten his neighbor, South Korea, home to 300,000 Americans, to reduce Japan to rubble,” Gardner said. “This is a crazed maniac at the helm of one of the world’s nuclear regimes — trying to become a nuclear regime. We shouldn’t be in a position of flattery, be in a position to try to honor him, by bringing him into a conversation with the United States until he meets those obligations and promises.”

Saying Gardner had “revealed himself to be a fiercely confrontational fanatic,” the Pyongyang’s foreign ministry warned that the “lunatics” who insult the country’s dignity “cannot avoid the punishment of our troops and the people wherever they are on the earth,” according to a Google Translate rendition of a portion of the North Korean story Shim didn’t translate.

The Daily Caller pointed out that North Korea had gone ballistic about a month earlier when U.S. Sen. John McCain called Kim a “crazy fat kid.”

“The revolutionary forces of the DPRK with its nuclear force for as its pivot will fulfill its sacred mission of devotedly defending its supreme leadership representing the destiny and life of its people by dealing a merciless sledge-hammer blow at those daring [to] hurt the dignity of the supreme leadership,” the North said in late March.

— ernest@coloradostatesman.com