Ohhh, the humanity!!

Regarding the "controversy" about Saddam Hussein's hanging...

The guy was a mass-murdering thug. He was held in comfortable custody for 3 years by the US, who caught him (and who evinced no rush to kill him, but could have at any time) until, after a long elaborate trial an Iraqi court sentenced him, and the Iraqi Prime Minister ordered the sentence to be carried out forthwith. Considering Hussein's hundreds of loyal lunatic gunmen and bombers out in the country, who thought nothing of shooting up a bakery or incinerating a market in a "gesture of support" for the noble prisoner, that decision not to delay was not irrational.

So, at the time of his execution, his guards taunted him. Awwwwwwwwwwwww, the injustice, the pain of it all!! Can't we get a better quality of hangman nowadays? What has happened to the hangman labor-market, where we're reduced to hiring talkative teasers who can't resist poking fun at their client? And one of them even had the gall to record the proceedings on his cellphone! Where has the professionalism of this great calling gone? Where can we find some hangmen of good old-fashioned solemnity and menace?

Good grief.

Let's recall what WASN'T done with Hussein: He wasn't forced to watch videos of his children tortured to death. He wasn't tortured to force him to confess to imaginary crimes. He wasn't shot a few minutes after capture and hung upside down alongside his [also shot] girlfriend. He wasn't shot in the snow, next to his wife, after a 2-hour military tribunal. He wasn't shoved into an industrial shredder, or an acid vat, or molten steel. He wasn't cut into small pieces, placed in a box, and delivered to his surviving family. He didn't have his ears, hands, or other appendages lopped off in public spectacles. Those were just a few of the grim outcomes that awaited several other comparable modern despots, or were ordered BY HIM to be carried out against those he SUSPECTED of disloyalty...and none after public trials replete with defense lawyers, challenges to the court, public statements, and witnesses under oath. Oh, and the mint tea every afternoon.

My, my, just before his trapdoor fell and his neck snapped, his guards teased him and one of them photographed the proceedings. Oh, well.

Is this really a news story?