Saturday, December 30, 2006
a flag that guarantees the rights of men like me and you:
Read the names of the dead below. Ask yourself if a cynical show trial was worth the life of a single one of them.

Bush said, with no evident awareness:

Today, Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial -- the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime.

Fair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule. It is a testament to the Iraqi people's resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people's determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.

Bush is a torturer, so he wouldn't recognize a fair trial if he observed one. (I surely hope Baltasar Garzon will one day instruct him in what a fair trial looks like.) As Al Gore once observed, he dragged the name of the United States through Saddam Hussein's torture prison. The idea that Bush's hypocrisy and deception could force one to divert attention from the death of Saddam is a disgusting thing, but yet the coward who decrees an outcome and calls it justice demands condemnation. Perhaps the right thing to say is: One down, one to go.
--Spencer Ackerman
I apologize for trying to instigate trouble, but I was hoping that someone with a louder voice than mine could rail about the newest offering from The Spine:
"While Saddam won't be laid to rest with the mixed feelings that accompanied Pinochet's death..." Alas, there will be more mixed feelings than Eve anticipates. More important, there will also be--there already is--enormous sorrow and wailing for the probably the cruelest tyrant in the postwar world, barring (but only possibly) Pol Pot.

Off the top of my head I can think of Mao Zedong, Omar Al Bashir, Idi Amin, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, Said Mohamed Barre, Samuel Doe, Charles Taylor, Hissene Habre, Joseph Mobutu, Laurent Kabila, Haile Mariam Mengistu, Teodoro Nguema, Robert Mugabe, Sekou Toure, Than Shwe, Kim Jong Il, etc…
I do not understand why Peretz is considered a serious person.
Blogger joedokes | 6:08 PM