Moammar is no more

It’s all over the news right now and will no doubt make front-page headlines tomorrow morning. Former Libyan dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, was captured and killed today by Libyan rebels. That’s great for the Libyan people, and as a person of Middle Eastern descent, I’m happy to see one less dictator besmirching the reputations of good Arabs everywhere. But as an American, my feelings are a little mixed. Donald Trump is going to have to find someone else to rent out his front lawn at his Long Island home. And who’s going to entertain the TV audience with crazy rants at the UN Summit meetings?

Now that I got those two jokes out of the way, I’ll get on with my post. (Been saving that last one for a while now)

I read the Associated Press article detailing the death of Moammar Gadhafi. And when I say “detail”, man they really went into detail. I suppose if there were ever a case for a news story going into specifics about the grisly death of a human being, this would be it. Moammar Gadhafi probably just barely qualifies as a human, which in turn qualifies him for a story like the Associated Press wrote.

That said, I was pretty shocked when reading the story. I’m not sure if I was shocked at the amount of gory detail that AP decided to include, or the absolutely ruthless lack of mercy with which the rebels treated Gadhafi (not that he deserved any).

The story was not an obituary by any means, but instead a blow-by-blow account of how Gadhafi was killed after rebels discovered him hiding in a drainage pipe. According to the story, they didn’t keep him alive for long, but it was long enough to parade him about town on the hood of a truck before shooting him to death and dragging his bloody carcass through the streets. I’m paraphrasing here, but that’s the gist of the story.

Does the story go too far? It’s shocking for sure, but I think AP just about got it right. Gahdafi was a terrible person, probably as close to evil as any human can get and his actions in life were probably deserving of his horrible and undignified death as well as the “no holds barred” AP story his death received.   

Hey, next time the UN is in town, if Donald Trump wants to make a little extra income by leasing his lawn to a crazy foreign dictator, he can always get in touch with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

OK. Now I’m done.