MIA

Happy new year! Saddam's dead. Did you hear? Of course you did. You probably heard other things, too. Like how our president was asleep when it happened (around 9:30 PM Crawford time). Like how it happened on a Sunni holiday, which is technically illegal in Iraq. How it was accompanied by sectarian shouting and heckling, which is technically illegal everywhere, and how it was all filmed on a cell phone, so that we all knew that the "this is the new Nuremburg" line was bullshit. This last, by the way, may or may not be illegal, but, either way, the Iraqi government wants to find the guy who did the filming so they can cut his balls off.

Look, I'm not interested in defending Saddam. It goes without saying that I think the death penalty is simultaneously vicious and idiotic, but who cares? The problem with this particular execution has nothing to do with whether you think the death penalty is a good idea. It has to do with whether you think the fantasy war league of us and the Iraqis is competent to handle the single most public-relations-critical execution in modern history. And clearly, that would be a giant NO.

Apparently, the Bush administration still don't know about YouTube. I confess, I dozed off in front of the TV on execution night, waiting around to see footage and find out which network would be first to go over the taste barrier by showing the drop. But when I woke up and saw the censored footage all over CNN et al, I knew I only needed to wait a day or so for the YouTube version. I know this despite the fact that I just got my first digital camera for Christmas. I know this because I live on this planet. So why, pray tell, does our government not know it? Why the fuck can't they get their act together to think ahead to how things are going to play in the larger world? Why can't they discern important events from unimportant events, and try to figure out a way to make us look good, just once, just for a change? Like, I don't know, realizing that a video of the hanging would get out, and on the strength of that fact trying to help the Iraqis find a place that didn't look like a horror film for performing the execution? Just for starters.

I can't decide if it's that Bush and company are actually getting dumber and clumsier, or if it's that the election finally took away the dreamlike aspect of witnessing their behavior. But I find myself once again shockable -- something I haven't been for years. I'm actually kind of shocked that we were so stupid as to hand off Saddam to be executed with no planning and no forethought. And I'm really shocked that Bush has managed to dither without any kind of Iraq plan for 2 full months since his ass was handed to him on an electoral platter. I find it genuinely astonishing that people aren't really horrified that the American president is sitting around in the middle of a lost war doing nothing, and that he has the gall to go to bed at 9 PM while soldiers are dying in Iraq. And at the end of the dithering we're going to get an idiotic "troop surge" idea that is already dead in the water, a mere week or two before our fearless leader gets around to announcing it.

In a weird way, it's reminiscent of 9/11, when Bush went missing, and you had the sense that we were all here on our own, without a president, or a face on the nation. It's a hideous face, granted, but its absence is noteworthy, especially at those moments when its presence is most obviously required. Bush chickened out then, a fact which both he and most of the country managed to forget; I wonder if he remembers his cowardice that day, as I so vividly remember it, now that he has once again disappeared in the face of trouble. Hell, in the face of his job.