Sympathy For The Devil
By Michael R. Bowen (12/30/03)
By now I should have known better, but it never crossed my mind that anyone would come out with some of the revealingly silly things which have been provoked by the capture of Saddam Hussein.
Taking a break from paying off sexual abuse victims, the Vatican publicly condemned the handling of the newly captured tyrant. Referring to footage of Saddam being examined by an Army physician, Cardinal Renato Martino said the prisoner had been treated "like a cow". "I felt pity to see this man destroyed, (the military) looking at his teeth as if he were a cow. They could have spared us these pictures", he said. "Seeing him like this, a man in his tragedy, despite all the heavy blame he bears, I had a sense of compassion for him."
In a shocking parallel development, the ACLU and People For The American Way did not rush to denounce the Catholic Church's meddling in the affairs of the American government. The Separation of Church and State was not invoked. I can offer no explanation for this.
As we all know, it's the elephants who have a long memory, not the donkeys. Representative Jim McDermott (D-WA) demonstrated this by showing that he hasn't learned a thing from the fallout after he did a Hanoi Jane act in Baghdad before the war. He floated the amusing conceit that Bush had known all along where Saddam was, but timed his capture for maximum political effect. "It's funny", he said. "When they're having all this trouble, suddenly they have to roll out something." Showing a mastery of grammar, vocabulary, and syntax matched only by his grasp of reality, he added, "There's just too much by happenstance for it to be just a coincidental thing." He thinks the Bush administration could have found Saddam "a long time ago, if they wanted."
Instead of wasting eight frustrating months looking for Saddam, President Bush should have enlisted the Supreme Court. Anyone who can find in the Constitution a right to abortion, sodomy, and sex change surgery for convicted murderers, ought to be able to find anything anywhere.
Icing on this lunatic cake comes in the form of Democrats' predictable calls for Saddam to be tried by an international court, preferably the United Nations. I look forward to the spectacle of Libya, China, Cuba, and the Sudan meting out stern punishment to a dictator for committing the same crimes they commit routinely. I can't wait to see how the prosecution is handled by an organization which couldn't quite make up its mind in the first place whether Saddam was even a bad guy.
I have a better idea. We can give Saddam the death penalty, and have the U.N. administer it: we just return him to Iraq, but under the protection of the U.N. peacekeeping forces. As so many other people have learned the hard way, that's a sure way to get somebody killed.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Michael R. Bowen
