Just for the record I suppose I need to post something about the U.S. capture of a scraggly Saddam Hussein yesterday -- in a "very messy" hut in bucolic rural Iraq, of all places. I'm still not sure what the fallout from this bizarre turn of events will be; it's certainly better to have a criminal in custody than on the loose, but what about his cronies, or at least the nutters who continue to attack in his name? That grainy little video clip, repeated ad nauseam, of the tongue depressor: could we have chosen a more humiliating moment to broadcast to the world? The full cavity search, perhaps? Saddam was not really so popular among Islamic fundamentalist terrorist types (they have Osama to hang around with, after all), but this imagery will inflame their resistance of the probing American occupier, no? The fact that Saddam was sitting in a hole in the ground without a toilet, let alone an insurgent command center or even a cellphone, surely indicates that the daily guerrilla attacks can easily continue and escalate with him behind bars, right? The situation to me remains much the same as it was on Saturday: we have much larger problems to deal with...like the aforementioned Osama.

Two related news tidbits provoke me much more, though -- this morning on the Today Show, none other than Bill "Shut up!" O'Reilly looked right into the camera and urged "those of you who aren't happy about it" (i.e. Saddam's capture) to "look inside yourselves." WTF?! Was that a none-too-subtle "get with the program" from Mr. Doctrinaire himself, or just more condescending smugness of the sort that makes me want to kick the TV in when his mug appears? The dangerous thing about Bill is that if Saddam had instead carried out some kind of WMD terror attack yesterday, Bill would be right there in the spotlight *still* saying "I told you so" -- he's an equal-opportunity attention junkie. Only slightly less irritating, though far to the left, is Bill Delaney from WBUR, who smarmily wondered if GWB had "sealed his re-election" with the capture of Saddam. I guess even on NPR there are lazy kingmaker journalists who'd rather urge the country to take a collective decade-long nap than probe the tumultuous events of the day with any kind of rigor. Gah!