I had an entertaining conversation with my 4-year old daughter and her 4-year old friend yesterday. It occurred to me that in order to have an engaging story with a strong plot, it helps if you have a bad guy.
So, for several minutes, I would ask the two young’uns, “where would Cinderella be without…” and they would yell “the evil stepmother!” Where would The Little Mermaid™ be without Ursula the Sea Hag? Where would Little Red be without the big bad wolf? Well, you get the idea, but it’s a fun game, the girls enjoyed it, and you can go on as long as you like. Heck, you can even do voices like Darth Vader, if you’re into that sort of thing.
So… where would Dubbya be without Saddam? He tried to work his white-cowboy-hat hoo-doo using Osama bin Laden, but when he realized the improbability of successfully tracking him down, he had to shift the embodiment-of-evil a little ways down the axis to land on Mr. Hussein. Now, I’m not saying the guy isn’t evil. I’m not even saying he doesn’t deserve to die. I’m saying I don’t like our new big-stick foreign policy, and I don’t approve of the way the sons were handled – I find it hard to believe that there couldn’t have been a better opportunity to take them alive and take them to justice.
On a related note, here’s a good article from The Guardian U.K. called America Is a Religion.
On an unrelated and lighter note, here’s a fairly convincing argument that Paul really is dead.