The Defiant Despot Oppressed Iraq for More Than 30 Years

The hanging ended the life of one of the most brutal tyrants in recent history.

Architect of ruthless Iraqi dictatorship is hanged before dawn for crimes against humanity in the mass murder of Shiite men and boys in the 1980s

Over more than two decades of brutal authoritarian rule, Hussein led his nation from modernity to ruin.

» Edward M. Kennedy | We need to do much more to help Iraqi refugees, especially those who have helped our troops.

The Washington area will ring in the new year after one of the 10 warmest Decembers in more than 100 years.

Second storm grounds Denver flights

Costa Rican immigration agents and police are trying to stop a flood of illegal persons from entering the country from Nicaragua.

 In Iran's city council elections last week, moderate conservative and reformist candidates defeated Ahmadinejad's vehemently anti-American slate of allies. At a recent public meeting, angry Iranian students -- tired of theocratic lunacy and repression -- shouted down their president.
    By supporting terrorists in Iraq and Lebanon, enriching uranium and insanely threatening to destroy a nuclear Israel, Mr. Ahmadinejad is only alienating Iranians, who wonder where their once vast oil revenues went and how they can possibly pay for all these wild adventures.

In all this chaos -- which will take years to settle -- the United States needs to stick to its principles. Neither immediate military intervention nor dialogue with Iran is the answer. Instead, we must just keep up the pressure on the trash-talking Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is far weaker than he lets on.

"Never have I felt so insignificant, part of a scene so obviously set by God." -- Astronaut Thomas D. Jones, looking at the home planet while floating near the International Space Station 200 miles aloft.

Sen. Tim Johnson is still under sedation, and AP's report contains this alarming quote (missing from the version now posted on WaPo):

Dr. Keith Siller, director of the Comprehensive Stroke Care Center at NYU Medical Center and assistant professor at the NYU School of Medicine, said it is unusual for a patient to be sedated after brain surgery for more than a few days.

"The two-week period is longer than I would be happy with," he said.

Siller is not the doctor on the scene, of course. Congressional Quarterly has some more encouraging stats [via IP]. ... He said it: Only Slate 's Tim Noah, however, has had the balls to prematurely speculate about a partisan Schiavo do-si-do in which Tom DeLay suddenly realizes that 'quality of life' is what counts, while Democrats discover that maybe the Schiavo conservatives had a point.

 Even literary masterpieces didn't escape his forceful criticism. Henry Fielding, one of England's greatest novelists, was "a blockhead." Paradise Lost, he said, "is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again.  None ever wished it longer than it is."

The experience he gained from being a careful practical lexicographer also gave him insight into how language works in general, and his comments on language show a sensitivity that was unparalleled in his day, and has few rivals in our own. One of the perennial debates among people who discuss the language is whether it is the job of commentators to be prescriptive or descriptive. The prescriptivists tell you the way the language should be; the descriptivists tell you the way it is.

The prescriptivists warn against splitting infinitives and insist that it's wrong to end sentences with prepositions; the descriptivists say such rules are artificial and old-fashioned, and a linguist should care only about the way real people speak and write. The two sides glower at each other across the pages of scholarly journals and editorial pages: The prescriptivists see themselves as champions of standards of propriety and their opponents as wild-eyed linguistic anarchists; the descriptivists see themselves as realists and their opponents as inflexible linguistic authoritarians. And many on both sides are eager to claim the authority of Johnson, the first great theorist of the English language, to support their cause.

So which camp is Johnson's? It should be no surprise that there's no consensus. Those who claim Johnson was a prescriptivist point to entries in his Dictionary like ruse, which Johnson says is "A French word neither elegant nor necessary," or scomm, "A word out of use, and unworthy of revival." The word thro' was "Contracted by barbarians from through," and disannul should "be rejected as ungrammatical and barbarous." Here Johnson seems to be delivering edicts, issuing verdicts on whether words should live or die.

Those who see him as a pioneer descriptivist, on the other hand, point to passages in the Dictionary like this: "It is not in our power to have recourse to any established laws of speech, but we must remark how the writers of former ages have used the same word"--in other words, the only guide to language is usage, not logic, not rules. He wrote that his job was not to "form, but register the language," not to "teach men how they should think, but relate how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts."

The only way to settle this question is through careful attention to Johnson's Dictionary, his great monument to the English language. Reading the entire work from cover to cover, though, is the work of months, even years. Johnson defines some 43,000 words, illustrating those words with around 115,000 quotations from great English authors, in a book that stretches to roughly three million words of text.

To put that in perspective, Moby-Dick, War and Peace, and the collected works of Shakespeare combined are just over half the length of Johnson's Dictionary

The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson has been underway since the mid-1950s, and after half a century is finally nearing completion. When finished, it will be the first collected edition of Johnson's works since 1825; already it's a major scholarly achievement.

The preface (of Johnson's Dictionary) opens with his gloomy survey of the prospect before him:

"It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward.

Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the slave of science, the pionier of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths of Learning and Genius, who press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress. Every other authour may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompence has been yet granted to very few."

"The English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow. . . . I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise."

This is the ugly legacy of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq: An awful mess of a country that cannot even get the trial and punishment of deposed dictator right, a justice system that schedules the taking of life for political and propaganda purposes, a thuggishly brutal state that executes according to whim rather than legal standard.

According to Human Rights Watch, which has a long and honorable history of documenting and challenging the abuses of Hussein's former government, the execution early Saturday morning followed "a deeply flawed trial" and "marks a significant step away from respect for human rights and the rule of law in Iraq."

For fifteen years, Human Rights Watch had demanded that Hussein be brought to justice for what the group has rightly described as "massive human rights violations." But the group argues that Hussein was not brought to justice.

In addition to objecting at the most fundamental level to the use of the barbaric practice of state-sponsored execution--which is outlawed by the vast majority of the world's nations--Human Rights Watch notes that Hussein was killed before being tried for some of his most well-documented acts of brutality.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi takes office this week puzzling over what to do about Rep. Allen Mollohan, the West Virginia Democrat who, probably thanks to earmarks, became a multi-millionaire while serving 11 terms in Congress.

Mollohan is scheduled to head the Appropriations subcommittee covering the FBI, which is currently investigating him. Several Democratic House members feel Mollohan should at least recuse himself from considering FBI appropriations, but some feel Pelosi should keep him from taking the chairmanship until his case is resolved.

Mollohan has been a strong ally of Pelosi and is close to Rep. John Murtha, another new Appropriations subcommittee chairman also accused of misusing earmarks. Pelosi supported Murtha's unsuccessful candidacy for majority leader.

Across Europe, anger with the currency has never been higher. In Italy, officials talk about circulating the lira along with the euro. In France, most now want to scrap the common currency and bring back the franc. In Germany, the Finance Ministry blames the euro for economic stagnation. And a growing share of Germans pine for their beloved deutsche mark.

A special survey by the European Union this month found "the lowest rate of approval for the euro since its introduction" in 1999. Fewer than half of those in the 12 nations that use the euro describe it as "overall advantageous for their country."

The euro is strong for one big reason: The Fed is done raising interest rates here, but the European Central Bank has just begun. Once the ECB is finished, and Europe's economy slows, the euro's rise is unlikely to continue.

Early in December there was a huge breakthrough in solar energy: Boeing-Spectrolab, with funding from the Bush Energy Department, converted sunlight to electricity with more than 40% efficiency — a world record. The development may lead to solar energy systems that cost only $3 per watt to install, and that generate electricity at only 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. This could be a big long-term step toward reducing America's reliance on oil.

Now that the North Carolina State Bar has filed a 17-page, 41-count ethics complaint against District Attorney Michael Nifong's handling of the Duke rape case, there's a different kind of New Year's countdown taking place in Durham: when and under what circumstances will Nifong leave office.

The Dec. 28 ethics charges are expected to be expanded when the state bar's grievance committee meets again Jan. 18. Like a grand jury, the committee meets periodically; the current ethics charges stem from its most recent meeting in October and cover public statements Nifong made about the case last March and April.

The North Carolina governor's office, which appointed him to the post, could also ask him to resign from office. Gov. Mike Easley declined to comment publicly Friday.

NOBODY who experienced Iraq under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein could imagine, at the height of the terror he imposed on his countrymen, ever pitying him. Pitiless himself, he sent hundreds of thousands of his countrymen to miserable deaths, in the wars he started against Iran and Kuwait, in the torture chambers of his secret police, or on the gallows that became an industry at Abu Ghraib and other charnel houses across Iraq. Iraqis who were caught in his spider’s web of evil, and survived, tell of countless tortures, of the psychopathic pleasure the former dictator appeared to take from inflicting suffering and death.

...

That I could feel pity for him struck the Iraqis with whom I talked as evidence of a profound moral corruption. I came to understand how a Westerner used to the civilities of democracy and due process — even a reporter who thought he grasped the depths of Saddam’s depravity — fell short of the Iraqis’ sense, forged by years of brutality, of the power of his unmitigated evil.

Scott Ott has it, along with word of coming attractions:

Mr. Woodward said he would not comment on rumors that he will soon publish interviews with singers James Brown and Lou Rawls, cartoonist Joseph Barbera, actors Don Knotts, Jack Palance, Glenn Ford, June Allyson, Dennis Weaver, Shelley Winters and Jane Wyatt, as well as Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin and sportscaster Curt Gowdy, all of whom died in 2006 and may have been secretly critical of Mr. Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq.

SENATOR JOHN KERRY
 304 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
 WASHINGTON DC 20510

DEAR SENATOR KERRY:

WE ARE STILL LAUGHING OVER HERE IN IRAQ AT YOUR JOKE ABOUT THE TROOPS BEING DUMB.   WE DO RECOGNIZE THAT YOU ARE A LOT SMARTER THAN WE ARE BECAUSE YOU WERE ABLE TO GET OUT OF COMBAT IN THREE MONTHS.  THIS IS WHY WE ARE SEEKING YOUR ADVICE.  PLEASE GIVE US GUIDANCE.

1.) WHERE IS THE LEAST PAINFUL AREA ON THE BODY TO INFLICT A WOUND?
 2.) DOES IT HAVE TO BLEED OR WILL A SCRATCH DO?
 3.) WHERE DO YOU GET THE FORMS TO FILL OUT RECOMMENDING YOURSELF FOR A PURPLE HEART?
 4.) DO YOU NEED A WITNESS?  IF SO, HOW MUCH DOES THAT COST?
 5.) ARE THREE PURPLE HEARTS STILL GOOD FOR A TRIP HOME?
 6.) WHAT IS A REALISTIC PERIOD OF TIME IN WHICH TO ACQUIRE THESE WOUNDS?  LESS THAN THREE MONTHS SOUNDS A LITTLE SUSPICIOUS EVEN TO US  

THANKS FOR YOUR HELP AND KEEP THE JOKES COMING. 

JUST A DUMB G.I.

 P.S.--WHAT ADVICE CAN YOU GIVE ME ON HOW TO MEET REALLY RICH WOMEN?