Hit Me Baby One More Time:
Goddamn, the Rude Pundit can't get enough of the Saddam video. He can't go five minutes without seeing Hussein's hairy face, looking like the old bum in Amores Perros. He loves seeing the lice and chigger check of Hussein's hair. He feels a bit of loss if he misses one rerun of the tooth check and DNA swabbing. Jesus Christ, if they do an anal probe to see if Saddam has the weapons of mass destruction hidden up his ass, the Rude Pundit wants to see it. He wants it all.

He wants to see how barbaric we can all truly be, now that it appears the American mass media are Iraqi-by-proxy in their mad desire for torture and the death penalty. He wants to see Saddam getting the cattle prod to his nuts and Uday and Qusay's reconstructed heads being used as puppets to question him. He wants Fox News to have a poll on what can be inflicted. He wants a reality show where Saddam is kept alive to the whims of the American public, who suffered for so long under Saddam's reign. Every night, Americans can vote, by phone, online, shouting out of the window, on what they'd like done to Saddam tonight. There can be a contest for the person who comes up with the best, most painful torture that keeps him alive. The prize? Maybe an ear or a finger that you can mount on your wall and act like you confronted the Butcher of Baghdad yourself. "Hey, Sean, tonight I'd like to see Saddam forced to eat his own pickled cock and balls."

Yee-ha! And, man, the Rude Pundit fuckin' loves all the footage of the hole in the ground where Saddam was "hiding" before he was captured. He wants to see that hole some more. He loves watching every reporter on every fucking news channel get into that hole, and, if they can't, to get into a replica live on the air in the studio (as on MSNBC this afternoon). It's a great hole, a glory hole.

Yep, America. We got 'em. The one that did dick to us. The one that is right now just a projection of all our desires to capture Bin Laden. As astute reader Stephanie pointed out, for a while, right after the capture, every photo of Saddam, it seemed, was accompanied by a photo of Bin Laden. And, of course, the question of whether we'll capture Bin Laden seems to come up constantly. "Sadaam/Osama. Osama/Sadaam, Sadaam/Osama, Osama/Sadaam, Sadaam/Osama, Osama/Sadaam... is it any wonder people believed that Sadaam was behind 9/11? And is it any wonder that this isn't going to change? They may as well have put up photos of the towers burning," Stephanie said.

But, shit, and whoopee, we got 'em. And as Atrios points out, Leslie Stahl on CBS was practically begging Donald Rumsfeld to feed her torture fetish. Asked ace reporter Stahl, "Let's say he's not forthcoming. Would we deprive him of sleep? Would we make it very cold where he is, or very hot?"

Oh, man, only if we all get to watch it live. So we can dine to it. Jack off to it like a lover. Over and over and over and over . . .