Does Osama Use an Electric Toothbrush?

Don't know about you, but I arose today and went about my morning constitutional just as I did before Saddam Hussein was hanged. As I peered in the bathroom mirror at my grizzlded visage, I did wonder whether Osama bin Laden uses an electric toothbrush or the old-fashioned kind in his mountain redoubt.

What do you think?

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE

Juan Cole, the emminent if occasionally annoying authority on the Arab world, comes to the same conclusion in a Salon commentary on Saddam's swan song as did Yours Truly.

"Through the bumbling of the U.S.-backed regime, justice becomes revenge, and a despot becomes a martyr."

My take is here.

Then there's Josh Marshall, who gets the Most Eloquent prize for a commentary he put up at Talking Points Memo in the hours before the execution.

ONWARD INTO THE PAST

It's kind of sad but not surprising that many mainstream media reporters and most definitely their editors still cannot factor the blogosphere into a major breaking story like Saddam's Sayonara.

An example is Alessandra Stanley's "TV Watch" column in the Sunday New York Times on the pre-execution death watch by the cable news channels and the networks and then the scramble to broadcast Iraqi TV footage when the door opened under the Terror of Tikrit.

No mention that blogs were all over the story in ways that CNN and their ilk were not. Stanley seems so oblivious to the blogosphere that her piece reads like it could have be written five or 10 years ago. Just change the news event to fit the time.

RUSH TO JUDGMENT

Aussie blogger Mark Holder wonders whether Saddam was hanged before his second trial on the 1988 poison gas attack in Halabja because of the covert roles that the U.S., British and French governments played in helping Iraq obtaining chemical weapons technology.

The New York Times takes a stab at why the 30-day appeals period was ignored here and does a dandy job of missing the main point:

Saddam would not have been hanged when he was hanged without U.S. approval. Period.

Chris Floyd is less kind at Empire Burlesque in savaging the Times for taking at face value a statement from a faceless Baghdad official that the U.S. had no issue in handing over Saddam to the Iraqi government but needed everything to be done in accordance with the law.: "You must admit this is rich: Bush officials -- creators of the special 'military tribunals' for their special, made-up catagory of 'enemy combatants' who can be jailed indefinitely without trial or charges or even killed, all at the arbitrary order of the omnipotent president -- fretting over 'due process' for Saddam Hussein. American citizens are no longer guaranteed due process -- which is now solely in the Decider's gift -- but we are going to believe that Saddam's rights were uppermost in the Occupier's mind before his execution."

AN XXX-RATED HANGING

Finally, I urge you to watch the entire hanging here as captured by a camera cellphone.

It gives new meaning to the concept of pornography, doesn't it?

(Photograph by Bassim Daham / The Associated Press)