Go on, Burt. Tell the folks why it's not easy being a liberal.
It was inevitable that while most of the civilized people of the world, including millions of Iraqis, celebrated the death of Zarqawi, there was one significant group that pooh-poohed the happy occasion. I refer to those notorious party-poopers, American liberals.
Most of their consternation centered on two things. The first of these was that America had turned him into a martyr. Leftists insisted that his death was meaningless because dozens of Muslims would rise up to take his place, while millions of others would now be provoked into joining the ranks of the extremists. That is what the pinheads always say, but the fact is that by this time, after all the suicide bombings and after the killing of so many so-called insurgents and after the capturing of Saddam Hussein, if there's one thing that's a glut on the market, it's Islamic martyrs. By this late date, surely they must have run out of virgins in Paradise, and be making do with divorcees, the recently widowed, and elderly spinsters.
The other thing the liberals started spouting off about was the suspicious timing of Zarqawi's execution. As usual, when something terrific occurs that might reflect favorably on the administration, the lefties spring into action. In this case, they claimed that we could have killed or captured the butcher of Baghdad on several earlier occasions, except that the Republicans were waiting for the most opportune moment in order to cash in politically. What they failed to bother explaining was exactly how, with elections in November, killing Zarqawi in early June could possibly be regarded as an example of cynical strategy, easily traced to the nefarious mind of Karl Rove.
I suppose the thing to keep in mind is that these are the same lunkheads who kept insisting back in 2004 that, suddenly, on the eve of election day, George Bush would announce that we'd just nabbed Osama bin Laden. And when that didn't happen, I don't remember even one of them admitting he'd been a sap to suggest it.
Speaking of Osama, I wish to go on record and state that I really don't care if we never capture him. Let's face it, if we did, we'd merely have to live through another farcical trial, such as Hussein's. If it’s all the same to you, I don't need to hear Ramsey Clark and a team of leftist lawyers pleading his case night after night on the news. In the end, after all, even if he were found guilty, he'd only wind up receiving a prison sentence. Frankly, I prefer to picture him roughing it in the mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan, cowering every time a helicopter flies by, than imagine him watching cable TV, working out in the weight room, and showing up in our living rooms every other week, courtesy of Larry King, Barbara Walters, and Geraldo Rivera.
One question left unanswered for me was whether or not America's bad will ambassador, Jimmy Carter, flew over to Iraq to pay his respects at Zarqawi's funeral.
Burt Prelutsky has been a humor columnist for the L.A. Times and a movie critic for Los Angeles magazine. He is the author of Conservatives are from Mars (Liberals are from San Francisco).
