Like most people who are fans of human beings, I’m pretty glad that Uday and Qusay Hussein have gone to their last reward, and that the reward in question likely involves tortures that even they would have deemed “a little over-the-top.” I even wish I could have seen Qusay in those last moments, frantically jumping up and down a pyramid of tumbled-down cement blocks, desperately trying to change them all to the same color in time. And I’m glad that Iraqi radio will no longer be forced to play that “hilarious” song parody recorded by the brothers in 1998, “Uday Tomato, Qusay Tomahto.”

But I just don’t understand how exactly the Bush administration can believe that the deaths of the Super Wario Brothers is going to help them get past this flap over steroid-infused intelligence. The connection between the two issues doesn’t seem to exist, except perhaps in the sentence, “Don’t look at those intelligence reports, look at these dead bodies!”

The administration just won’t acknowledge that most of their critics think that deposing Saddam and attempting to bring democracy to the region are good things. Dick Cheney asks, “How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat?” That’s yet another iteration of the administration’s Big Straw Man Strategy, wherein they really stick it to those bastards who thought we should have just sat back and hoped that Saddam’s heart would spontaneously grow three sizes one Christmas morning. You know those guys they’re talking about, guys like, um… nobody.

What we need to keep remembering is this: We couldn’t wait for the inspections to finish because there was no time. We couldn’t make a complete and careful case to the the U.N. and the world because time was running out. We had to act when we did because the threat was imminent.

So now, if it seems like maybe, perhaps, we were wrong or even misled about the urgency of the cause, that maybe we could’ve sent a few more diplomats around the horn, gathered in some allies, and saved American lives… I don’t see that the immolation of even an infinite line of Hussein spawn is going to distract us or ameliorate that fact. You could print up several more decks of cards, hunt them all down, simulcast Saddam’s execution worldwide in high-definition with Dolby Surround Sound, and receive a note reading “Dear America, We give up. Sincerely, The Forces of Evil,” and still people will want to know if more American lives could have been spared. On that issue, at least, we have all the time in the world.