PhotoDude.com

Sun. Dec 14, 2003

Hidey Holes

Hidey Holes – (Caution: Flu induced rhetoric ahead) Imagine. You’ve spent the past eight months on the run. You’re reduced to living ”six feet under” in a three by eight foot hole, though you look completely homeless, to judge by the hair and beard. You were once the most feared man for hundreds of miles, but now you’ve been caught, yet are secretly happy to be able to talk to some new faces for a change. They film you being checked for lice, and show it to the world.

How humiliating. But it gets worse.

You peek over the shoulder of a US soldier who is surfing the web on his laptop, and you catch a glance of this: ”Saddam was a bad guy, but it isn’t clear he’s any worse of a guy than some of the folks who are a part of our ’Coalition of the Willing’...”

And you think, ”what’s a guy gotta do?” Kill a million Muslims (Iranians, Shi’ites, Kuwaitis, Kurds, etc.), some of them with chemical weapons, leave 300,000 bodies lying in mass graves as proof of your vicious rule, and this is the recognition you get?!? An American claims that you aren’t any worse than the leaders of the US, Britain, Australia, Poland, and other members of the ”Coalition of the Willing.”

You are furious, realizing that your decades of tyrannical rule are now scoffed at and tossed aside in the name of the Almighty American Political Spin.

And, then, you wake up. Your nightmare is disturbed by a strange sound.

American soldiers are digging you out of your hidey hole. You remember your dream of the offending web page, know that there will likely be many more expressing similar ”sentiments,” and decide there is no way you can resist such overwhelming spin.

You give up without a fight, a totally beaten man, ready to spill all your beans.

So God Bless Atrios and his ilk for doing their part to bring Saddam to justice as the murderer of a million Muslims, and for their touching memory of those hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives Saddam brought to an unnatural end. It shows us where their heart is … over in that cubbyhole marked ”partisan politics,” dusty from disuse.

Where would we be without people like Atrios to remind us not to merely accept what we see as the obvious truth? For example, those Iraqi’s you see celebrating in the streets, the ones the media claims are joyous over the capture? They are merely cheering Saddam on, because they know he now has the US forces right where he wants them, and will soon kill them all … single-handedly.

Meanwhile, Americans are depressed by the news: ”Sigh. All I can think about is the effect of Saddam’s capture on the Dean campaign! [...] Somebody cheer me up, please!” That must be the true message of today.

In closing, I want to point out another ”Zeyad scoop.” A week or so ago, he wrote that ”Saddam is Everywhere,” like the Iraqi version of Elvis. One of the stories: ”In Baghdad, a woman sweared that she rented a taxi and after getting inside, the driver turned to her and exchanged small talk with her. Of course that driver was Saddam.”

The only transportation they found near Saddam’s hidey hole … was a taxi. Hey, even a deposed tyrant has to make ends meet. And it would appear from his capture that he was down to his last $750,000.