TPM on the Hanging: "It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion."

Joshua Micah Marshall finds the hanging of a piece with all of the other staged events that mark the Bush war.

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.

(Tags: execution, Saddam, Saddam Hussein)