CNN's Aaron Brown: No Death Penalty for Saddam

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Last night while channel-surfing in a hotel I happened to catch about 30 seconds of Aaron Brown's CNN evening news show. I never watch Mr. Brown, because I can't stand his smirking, self-righteous and left-leaning approach to the stories he reads. This time Brown was editorializing against the death penalty for Saddam Hussein. Rather than switch channels immediately (my usual approach) I listened, somewhat slack-jawed, to his commentary.

Brown's argument had some logical and emotional appeal: Saddam should spend his life in a cell he built himself, knowing that he'd never return to power and that it was his own people who had imprisoned him. Brown seemed confident that for Saddam, life in prison was a fate worse than death.

At first I could hardly believe it, but then I remembered who I was listening to-- perhaps the most smugly liberal news reader on the tube. And that is saying a lot!

I won't go into detail on all the reasons why I think life in prison for Saddam is a really, really bad idea. What really struck me was that Brown and his ilk are so provincial in their liberal orthodoxy that they unhesitatingly apply those
views to every situation, anywhere in the world. To hear Brown talk, you would have thought Saddam is a garden-variety murderer from Alabama. Of course, in Saddam's case Brown has no "cruel and unusual punishment" argument to make under the U.S. Constitution, so I assume he is simply advocating the position on the death penalty that "civilized" industrial democracies (i.e., old Europe) have adopted.

Is there no limit to the blind moral sanctimony of these people?