They're posting screenshots of the hanging

With apologies to Mr. Zimmerman of Hibbing and his opening line to "Desolation Row," this recording of Saddam's execution goes well beyond good taste's boundaries.

Granted, this is a nation that since his ouster has frequently exported videos of captured Americans getting beheaded by masked insurgents. But even CNN displayed a photo of his corpse after the execution. They hid it behind a skimpy "mature content" warning - you know, the type of disclaimer ignored by web surfers of all ages.

And now a security guard is under arrest for allegedly smuggling a camera phone into chamber and recording the raucous last moments of Saddam's life, with the guards taunting him, witnesses shouting and Saddam mocking them in return.

I know several people who hunted online for the video of the dictator being hanged (It is "hanged," remember - "hung" means something very different).

No wonder the insurgents are blowing holes in their country at will - in America, you can't sneak a camera phone into a movie preview screening, but in Iraq, you can get one into the secret exeuction site of its deposed dictator. Or maybe the lesson is that even at a hanging, someone's going to show off how important they are by flashing the cell phone. I'm waiting for his death to provoke stability in the fractured wartorn country; I might be here awhile.

CNN isn't the only culprit. Rolling Stone continued its morbid fascination with a casket shot from James Brown's viewing at the Apollo Theatre. In some form, they kept it on the front page of their Web site for a almost a week.

Anyone who's attended an open casket funeral knows its rare for the departed to bear more than a passing resemblance to their living selves. Brown's looks as if it might have been stolen from Madame Tussaud's. So really, why bother?

Perhaps it deals with Brown's last major moment in the public eye, the infamous bathrobe mugshot taken by police after Brown was arrested on domestic violence charges. It's hard to forget that jet-black hair paired with Brown's alpine white facial hair.

No matter their actions in life, photos of the dead should not be paraded around or tucked under a toothless warning. The Saddam videos were just about amusement (in America) and outrage (among Iraq's Sunni minority).


None of those images ever belong on a postcard - or in a screenshot, for that matter.