Tom Brokaw was on Imus the other day and talked about the disastrous Saddam execution. Another monumental blunder under the care of the Bush administration. And there still are way too many right wing ghouls on the Internet. Just ask James Wolcott.

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AJ's take: "Instead, the Bush administration turned over Saddam to the Iraqi government prematurely . . . to a band of thugs-as-executioners . . . who wore not uniforms but leather jackets and ski masks . . . who shouted Shia chants, including invocations of Moqtada al-Sadr . . . all of which was illicitly ideotaped and then emailed around Iraq and throughout the world . . . on, no less, one of the holiest days of the Sunni religious calendar."

Nico supplies the transcript:

BROKAW: I honestly don’t know either. But Saddam Hussein who had disappeared, in effect, as some kind of a symbol over there, suddenly becomes a martyr. He was a terrible tyrant who was responsible for an untold number of deaths, you know, waged his own jihad against the Shiite in that country, especially in the south following Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s, and now he’s able to stand up there with the hood off and invoke prayer and even invoke the Palestinians, and go out in the eyes of his people at least as a martyr.

IMUS: I mean, it’s difficult to imagine how this could have turned out worse.

BROKAW: No, it is pretty difficult to imagine, and it’s, you know, just as the military commanders and the political people who are trying to run the war think that they’ve got something quieted over in one front, it pops up in another

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Clip O' Humor

by James Wolcott

The strangest thing in the broadcast happened when the show was over. The panelists stood, Sullivan's back to the camera, and as the credits rolled, he began squeezing, massaging his own buttocks with his hands. I thought he might be trying to dislodge a thong strap that had run up rather deep, but no, he seemed to be feeling up his own butt. I've never seen anything quite like it, unless I was hallucinating, and if I start hallucinating about Andrew Sullivan copping a feel of his own butt, it's time to check into the clinic for a little Elizabeth Wurtzel layoff.

Video

James Wolcott:

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