MEDIA LIBERALS MISS MAIN STORY ON SADDAM
By KIRSTEN POWERS
New York Post online

This piece is written by Kirsten Powers, a former Clinton appointee in the Clinton Administration, who just happens to be a Fox News Political Analyst. That will probably immediately turn off the extreme leftists like members of the American Nationalist Socialist Workers Party who came and visited the Wide Awakes the other day. She is a social liberal, as far as I can tell, for example, she was against the Iraq War, I supported it, she is against the death penalty, and I am for it. (Interesting how they’re ‘against’ things and we’re ‘for’ things.) But the conclusions she draws in this piece are fascinating, considering they’re coming from someone who I would term as a liberal. It gives me a little bright spot. Thanks to TK for sending this in.

January 7, 2007 — I DIDN’T support the Iraq war and I oppose the death penalty - but the nonstop outrage and criticism of the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein is puzzling.

Somehow, most of our nation’s newspapers and magazines overlooked the core of this story: An evil dictator was brought to justice - the people he tortured, murdered and oppressed turned around and put him on trial, then carried out the sentence.

How often does this happen in our world? Pretty much never.

This is a true observation, I would like to see fewer appeals and more executions. When you’ve done the crime, you should do the time, and if the crime is bad enough to have a death penalty attached to it, I don’t see a problem. I’m not for ‘kumbaya’ candlelight vigils complaining about the inhumane execution of someone who raped and killed children, or serial killers. The numbers of people who actually RECEIVE the death penalty are much fewer than the numbers who are sentenced to die, and those are even small.

Yet The New York Times (in news and opinion pages alike) has relentlessly criticized nearly every aspect of the process, only paying lip service Saddam’s heinous crimes.

And this comes as a surprise?

USA Today’s editorial board criticized the trial and execution and then assessed the whole episode as basically inconsequential. (Tell that to the millions of Iraqis who suffered under Saddam).

Well that’s because the leftists in the secular newsrooms of today don’t see anything wrong with communist dictators (and that’s what Saddam was).

Oddly, most of the complaints ignored the many problems with the death penalty. Instead, critics were consumed by how unfairly Saddam was allegedly treated. Particularly distressing to this crowd was the “taunting” of the Butcher of Baghdad. Huh?

Well who’s going to argue that sharia law demands it? Leftists are more concerned with what they have in common with the terrorists rather than how they differ. The terrorists, I’m sure, once they’ve won with the help of their ‘useful idiots’, will take care of the differences. In the same manner as Saddam Hussein after he took power in 1976.

True, the trial and the execution were disorderly. And much of the trial’s disorder was thanks to Saddam’s narcissistic outbursts and the kidnapping and murders of witnesses and lawyers. Let’s give Iraq’s nascent democracy, which is struggling in the middle of a war, at least a little credit for managing to even hold a trial of their former dictator. To expect its justice system to function as ours at this point is wildly unreasonable.

Yeah, it was pretty much Saddam who was yelling and pointing the finger at the judges in the court, but there were also assassinations of participants in this thing; it was amazing to see the Iraqis forge ahead when faced with all of this.

Critics complained that there was a “rush to justice.” Saddam was captured three years ago and went through two trials. That’s a rush?

The “rush to justice” is used any time capital punishment is used in response to a wackjob committing crimes like murder, torture, rape, and that sort of thing. His Fayadeen Saddam instituted a horrible 2-year beheading of women campaign. But the Women’s Rights Groups and the Human Rights Groups, to my knowledge, didn’t mention it, or much of what happened BEFORE US Troops went into Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people.

And he was guilty. Nobody denies this. They didn’t need to go any slower to find that out.

Well they could have gone on with the trials until they were all finished. Are we ever going to see all that was done during the Anfal campaign and see scores and scores of kurds paraded in front of the cameras with horrible stories to tell of Saddam using chemical weapons in the North? I think one of the things they successfully did by hanging him so swiftly is to bury his crimes in the public’s consciousness.

Saddam showed zero remorse, asking “Where is the crime, where is the crime?” during his trial for the death of 148 Shiites - where he was faced with testimony of survivors recounting the torture of parents in front of their children.

Why should he? He was a communist dictator. Don’t they all murder people? Didn’t one say ‘One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are statistics’.

He showed no emotion as witnesses told of Iraqi guards forcing live bodies through a mincing machine. Nor during testimony about a pregnant woman who had her legs tied together when she went into labor, forcing a slow and torturous death for her and her baby.

Other critics fretted that Saddam’s Sunni supporters, who thrived as a privileged elite under his sadistic rule, were displeased with Saddam’s treatment. That’s a bit like complaining that many Serbs opposed the war-crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic.

The criticism that took the cake came from the usually reasonable Brian Lehrer at WNYC, who posed this question to his listeners: “If pardoning Richard Nixon was good for the nation’s healing, then how could executing Saddam be good for Iraq?”

Well, gee: Saddam is responsible for the torture and deaths of millions. Nixon ordered a break-in and wiretapped phones, then tried to cover it up. The differences in the magnitude of the crimes seem painfully obvious.

Well that pretty much somes up their nonsensical arguments.

But Lehrer’s question came closest to revealing the unspoken view of virtually all the liberal critics: They don’t really believe that Saddam was uniquely evil. That became even more clear when he asked if Saddam didn’t deserve to be treated with more dignity.

Bizarre. Most opponents of the death penalty - myself included - think it’s inherently undignified. Are we suddenly supposed to think that having the executioners show respect would make it dignified?

The death penalty isn’t meant to be ‘humane’, it’s meant to deliver ‘justice’ for unbelievable crimes, some of which you described Hussein doing in detail.

And, again - opposition to the death penalty aside - why are we talking about the dignity due a brutal dictator? Instead, shouldn’t we be delighting at least a little at the thought of Kim Jong-il or Robert Mugabe sleeping a little less soundly - knowing that the unthinkable could someday happen to them, that they too could be called to account for their crimes against humanity?

That should be a prospect that liberal thought leaders - who one would think might stand up for the oppressed, not the oppressor - should embrace.

Opposition to the death penalty aside. How many times to you have to say you oppose the death penalty in this piece? What I find is amazing is that someone can look at Saddam Hussein, admit that they are opposed to the death penalty, but then go ahead and describe the reasons why the Iraqis were justified in putting him to death.

Nevermind that their constitution is based on sharia law, which prescirbes the death penalty for offenses much less repulsive than putting living people through plastic shredders feet first in order to hear the prolonged agony of their screams.

I think we’re beginning to see the real face of the American left; they ARE rooting for the oppressor.

Kirsten Powers, a Fox News political analyst, was a political appointee in the Clinton administration.