Was it just me, or did the media build-up to execution feel weirdly like New Year’s Eve in Times Square, waiting for Saddam to drop instead of the giant shiny ball?

Something very surreal last night about Larry King running the Saddam
death watch for an hour on CNN.  I kept waiting for him to ask, "so,
being hanged — how does it feel?"  Then when it was over, during Anderson Cooper’s shift, there was a surprising lack of… well, anything.  Just silence, the quiet end of a show trial whose result was preordained.

The L.A. Times had a big pre-packaged retrospective on Saddam today.  One of its early lines was excerpted out of context by the editor and placed as a nearby photo caption:

Ahem.  That statement is not actually true of any other current world leader I can think of.  Yet.

Anyway, lots of people know way more about this stuff than I do.  Go read Juan Cole, the whole page.  Juan also links to this video retrospective of Saddam’s relationship to the US, which covers a lot of ground quickly.