I am embarrassed to be an American now.

Had Hitler been the cause celebre, matters would have been different. Much different, because corporate leaders from all four corners of the globe would have been pining for his life.

Instead a CIA-installed stooge, by definition a bumb with nothing to lose, gets put to sleep by the mongriel horde that brought him to power in the first place. The media and its hand-picked apologists smoke cigars and cheer, once again, the awesome destructive power of a civilization brought to a point on the neck of one single human.

This was a human being whose trial and execution should have been an exclusively Iraqi affair. Instead, the taint of US involvement in his murder places him in history while cold-blooded killers like OJ Simpson wander around freely as if all is well in the human community.

Newsflash: we're sick and getting sicker. If snapping the neck of a human being made helpless gives you a stiffy, you either drink or drug too much, or you really do belong in the Sunni Triangle in your boxers with a box of ammo and a rifle that is full of sand.

*****

"Oh, I LOVE James Brown, I always have." "He's the godfather of Soul music!" "Yeah, even back when I was a kid, I was listening and buying his records, right along with my Pat Boone and Doris Day collection."

"I'm not prejudiced. I never was. I've always had lots of Negro friends, even back then." "I even sang along when he sang, "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud."

Sure you did, honeychild. Sure you did.

White people like James Brown now because he's dead.

*****

Straw, meet Man.

Mr. Liberalshit: May be you missed the fact that the poisongas Saddam used was produced by and in the States and sold to him via rightshit Dumsfeld. As long as there is the Bushit in power we all should worry, you included. Now go back and kiss Neo-Con asses.

He's done nothing wrong. His conscience is clear. He's a martyr. He's going to heaven.

Saddam was not just a mass murderer, but a torturer. A sadistic, sociopathic monster who is known to have put live people into meat grinders in front of their family members. And that was just one of his favorite forms of torture. And he'd still be doing it to this day just because he could.

If you want to shed a tear over his death then how sad for you. You must have some mighty skeletons in your own closet.

I don't know which is stupider, executing him before Iraq becomes more stable, or announcing it in advance to give the sectarian factions time to prepare reprisal attacks. Saddam wasn't going anywhere, and he certainly wasn't going to be returned to power, so why the rush to string this guy up? All they did was make a train wreck situation even worse.

What must the American troops over have been thinking when this brilliant decision was announced? Probably wondering why the Iraqi leadership is trying to make their job even harder. There is no doubt that once this was announced they had to know, both the troops and the Iraqi government, that there would be a wave of violence following.

Knowing the problems this would cause, I can't help thinking our own administration had a hand in this rush to the gallows. Did Bush's goon squad push Al Maliki into killing him off as quickly as possible in the vain hope that it would create some niave sense of Iraqi unity? That once Saddam was gone the remaining loyalists would somehow become disenchanted and just give up? When they went into Iraq back in '03, the assumption was that once Saddam was gone, all would fall into place and the country would be on it's feet again. Maybe the administration still believes this in a last desperate attempt to hold on to the original dream that sent them in there in the first place.

Certainly at this point even the administration has to know that killing off Saddam would just create more problems then it would solve. Perhaps it was a just another numbers game to them: "Well, sure it'll increase attacks in the short run, but in the long run it should cause the violence to slowly subside as the Sunni's begin to become more accepting of their place out of the majority power." This would be so typical of this administration to see our troops as simply pieces on a giant chess board to be sacrificed for the bottom line. "Trickle Down Victory." The president and his loyalists benefit fist, and the troops will eventually benefit in the long run. Those that survive anyway.

No one is claiming that Saddam wasn't scum, but this is probably the drop dead worst possible time to execute him. If the administration truly believes that the situation will get better, then why not wait until it actually does? Unless they know for sure that it won't and this is just a last "Fuck you" to the entire country. Leave it in as much chaos as possible as revenge for screwing up his dream of americanizing the middle east. They ruined his precious legacy, why not go out on his terms?

BIG, BIG, BIG, BIG!

THAT'S MY STIFFIE!

STIFF-STIFF-STIFFIE!

JOHN-HOLMES BIG STIFFIE!

FUCK LIBS STIFFIE!

I suppose some neocon whacko's gonna label me a Saddam supporter or some stupid bullshit for questioning people for simply parroting the party line, but speaking of "heads up asses", what's up, Chris? Gotta crush on Condi or something? Cuz I gotta tell you that as far as trusting the State Department goes, if I met Condi in person, and she looked me in the eye and told me she was a woman, I wouldn't believe her.

We're dealing with the administration that cried wolf here; so the point I'm making, Chris, is that I would really love to see you substantiate your arguments with incontrovertable facts. I don't question that Saddam was a brutal dictator - but I do believe the extent of his reported atrocities have been mistated, exaggerated, and intentionally uncorrected to promote the interests of a meglomaniacal cabal of neocons.

So show me some facts. How many people did Saddam's regime kill, exactly? Where are those numbers coming from?[1] Where did the weapons he killed them with come from? How do the numbers of people he killed compare with the number of people who have died as result of the US led invasion? Does it feel better to hold a small child mortally wounded by collateral shrapnel than to see them brutalized by state police? How does the number of people Saddam jailed compare to the number of people the US jails for petty offenses? How is the black incarceration rate in America any less ethnically challenged than Saddam's policies?[2]

I am certainly not putting Saddam on a pedestal - he was an evil man. I simply fail to see how the actions of the United States have been any less onerous than those of the dictator we usurped. I fail to see how the United States feels it has the moral standing to intervene on behalf of all those poor brown people over there. In just a few short years, the United States has, quite justifiably in my opinion, lost its moral standing in the world. We're a nation of insular agoraphobics, so we fail to see that, or we don't care. We're so glued to the couch that most of us barely know our own neighbors (especially if they are a different color). But the rest of the world matters to the United States, whether we like it or not. We need more than big guns and big balls to maneuver in the global landscape. We're failing miserably. Atrociously. It's an atrocity.

[1] http://tinyurl.com/48hle

[2] http://tinyurl.com/y8tjzp