Washington ? North Korea lashed out at President Bush Saturday for comments he made about the country’s leader, Kim Il Jong, at a news conference Thursday, asserting that the North Korean nuclear crisis will never be resolved while Bush remains in office.

Bush is “a half-baked man in terms of morality and a philistine whom we can never deal with,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.

North Korea declared in February that it had produced nuclear weapons and refused to return to six-nation disarmament talks. Saturday’s statement appears to signal the end of that diplomatic process, heightening the stakes in the impasse.

The Bush administration has engaged in an intensive effort to persuade North Korea to return to the talks, with a senior envoy shuttling among Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul last week. Bush took State Department officials and foreign diplomats by surprise with strong language at the televised news conference, calling Kim a “dangerous person” who ran “concentration camps.”

Kim is considered almost a deity in his country.

Bush had never made such cutting remarks about Kim in such a high-profile setting, though he occasionally referred to Kim as a tyrant while on the campaign trail last year. He was quoted in Bob Woodward’s 2002 book “Bush at War” as saying he loathed Kim because “he is starving his people.”

Administration officials have declined to explain the president’s remarks. “The president said what he had to say about Kim Jong Il and his regime, plain and simple in his plain-spoken way,” one official said.