America represents life. So does Israel.

* Joel Layden of the Israel News Agency via TL:

Many news media are now reporting on the fine details of what is a hanging. Providing minute by minute accounts of what would happen if the rope was too short or too long. Are we as a civilized Western world any different from the crowds that gathered to watch the French Guillotine at work or the hangman's noose in the old US West?

What distinguishes us from the Islamic terrorists that we fight is that we cherish life.
Yes, in war we can be more barbaric using pyschops as good if not better than the enemy by hanging blood dripping heads on wooden sticks. But do we need now to place Saddam's head on a wooden stick? Will video of his hanging decrease conflict or increase it in the Middle-East?
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America represents life. So does Israel. It's time for us to illustrate what kind of society we live in. What our values are. Yes, fight for freedom, but remember we are Christians and Jews. We are not the people who beheaded Daniel Pearl and celebrated.

* rudepundit:

"Saddam Hussein. Now that's a fuckin' tyrant, an old school motherfucker, bereft of nation, of sons, of rights, defiant and tough, ready to be hanged in the savage wasteland that was once his savage golden empire, even leaving a message of peace to the people of the country he ruled with madness and murder. The world has precious few vicious dictators left with the stones to have such a final act.

And once he hangs, as he will any time now, once he's videoed pissing himself while dangling from the noose, maybe even a close-up on his last hard-on, then it's time to go to work. Cut that fucker's head off his corpse and graft it onto George W. Bush's right shoulder, so that it rots away next to him just like Iraq, so the President can watch the decay every time he looks in the mirror and smell it constantly. Rip out Hussein's bones and shove them up the asses of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Michelle Malkin, and more and more - Saddam's got two hundred something bones, so line up a bunch of neocons and warmongering whores, bend 'em over, and give 'em a souvenir. Dry Saddam's organs and grind them into a powder and pour it into the water supply of the United States so we can each consume a little bit of the man who so drove our leaders crazy that they destroyed our economy, our military, our morality to topple him, yes, let us all drink that in, toasting the hanging of Saddam Hussein as a demonstration of what great and noble and righteous and merciful humans we are. Send his cock to Tony Blair so he can go fuck himself."

i probably wouldnt have said it quite like that, but I'm not rudepundit.

* krugman:

"Is that the end for the radical right? Probably not. As a long-suffering civil servant once told me, bad policy ideas are like cockroaches: you can flush them down the toilet, but they keep coming back. Many of the ideas that failed in the Bush years had previously failed in the Reagan years. So there’s no reason to assume they’re gone for good."

* xymphora:

"The Israel Lobby – now known generally as ‘the Lobby’ due to its unique and overwhelming power in American politics – forces the United States towards war, eliminates the possibility of real political debate on large areas of policy, and requires American politicians to take foreign policy positions that are obviously against the best interests of the United States. The Lobby is directly responsible for:

1. immoral and illegal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia (new!), and Palestine (with American taxpayers footing the bill, a bill they can’t afford, for most of these);
2. the threat of violence and wars against all the peoples of the Middle East (with the distinct possibility of a world-wide economic apocalypse, a possibility that doesn’t bother the Lobby in the least);
3. the destruction of the mechanics of the American political system, where all candidates of both parties are selected solely on the basis of their adherence to Lobby policies (this was make clear in the last set of elections, where Rahm Emanuel hand-selected candidates who would be pro-war, although the American people clearly wanted to be able to select anti-war candidates);
4. the destructive ‘war on terror’ and ‘Islamofascist’ memes, which have cause immense suffering throughout the world, and have completely subverted traditional protections afforded by the American legal system;
5. attacks on free speech, especially on free speech on the internet, all on the basis that such speech might be used to take positions contrary to those espoused by the Lobby and the Israeli extreme right (such positions are called ‘anti-Semitic’);
6. attacks on freedom of assembly (egregious example from the Lobby branch in Canada);
7. the promotion of the use of torture and targeted assassination (no matter what you think of other lobbies, including the infamous tobacco lobby, none of them advocates torture, violence, hatred and war as a direct part of lobbying efforts);
8. the weakening and perversion of international law (especially the removal of protections for civilians and national sovereignty), and the undermining of international organizations, such as the United Nations, that dare take any positions contrary to those of Israeli colonialism.

It is common for Lobby apologists to claim that we are ‘picking on’ Israel, singling out this tiny country all because we are really anti-Semites. How can anyone make this argument in the face of the immense damage caused by the lobbying group working for the interests of the Israeli right? The Lobby is uniquely dangerous, and must be stopped."