I’m sorry, but I just can’t get worked up over this.  So maybe he’ll be executed within 24 hours, or maybe in a month.  But who cares?  Either way, it’s really a footnote to current events and the War on Terror in my opinion. 

It’s ironic how this one person — the former boogeyman of the Bush Administration three years ago — has been reduced to an inconsequentiality.

UPDATE:  I think Josh hits the nail on the head:

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur — phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It’s a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

***

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren’t grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing’s a mess and that they’re going to be remembered for it — defined by it — for decades and centuries. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president’s issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off — so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic ‘So There!’

…This is what we’re reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there’s nothing else this president can get right.

I think decades from now, people will look back on Bush’s War and think: "The only thing we did right was get Saddam Hussein.  But it wasn’t worth the billions of dollars and thousands of American lives.  Not at all." 

In the present, however, the neo-cons — who have little to cheer about — are gloating in triumph, as if THIS will make the entire Iraq debacle worthwhile.  Malkin is having a freakin’ orgasm over it.  And while acknowledging that we’re civilized and not at all like the gleeful-in-killing dictator himself, Buckley can’t help express his "pleasure".  I think they’re going to start a letter campaign to ask that Saddam be executed on New Year’s Day, just as the big ball in Times Square drops.  And they’ll want it televised, too.  Call it "Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Middle-East-Dictator-Executin’ New Year’s Eve Party Fun Bash (with special performances by Penn and Teller, The Foo Fighters, and Celine Dion)"