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Sunday, January 27, 2008

Our Son of a Bitch

As I heard the "breaking news" last night of the far-too-late passing of the murderous fiend Suharto, I tried to mentally summarize my thoughts about this (to lamentably paraphrase one of the better lines from, ahem, Scrubs) bastard-coated bastard with bastard filling.

Two thoughts instantly caught my brain (and dragged it for fifty yards): one, that a Third World hole like Indonesia surely has more worthy uses for its presumably ludicrous and inept health-care system than to keep doddering kleptocrats in some perpetual machine-enabled state of undeath; two, that Suharto was responsible for more deaths than even our modern Middle Eastern neo-Hitlerian hobgoblin himself, Saddam Hussein.

Whither the urgency, then, not to mention that Suharto received far more American weaponry and training over many years (yes, including from humanitarian demi-god Bill Clinton) than Saddam could ever have dreamed of. But then, Suharto managed to internalize most of his pathological aggression upon his own people, rather than scaring his neighbors every few years. And Saddam was merely sitting atop something we coveted, not assuring that it all passed safely through the Straits of Malacca. Priorities, people.

Dennis Perrin sums it up pretty well. In a just world, Suharto would have ended up a perforated carcass in a rainy ditch thirty years ago -- or, like Saddam, jeered at and dropped at the end of a heavy rope -- instead of living out his dotage in stolen luxury, not unlike Idi Amin.

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