Gadhafi's Gone

Suddenly it seems that Moammar Gadhafi is no longer with us, as of yesterday, just seven months after the sweep against his longtime rule began.

There was a certain inevitability about the revolt in Libya that has some jarring elements, and as so often, those elements can probably all be chalked up to ego. After NATO joined in chasing him across Libya's top rim, along the Mediterranean coast, I thought it was likely that the moment Gadhafi saw the tide turning, he would seek refuge somewhere else, just in case, and there were lots of suggestions about that. Unlike the Tunisian former leader, Ben Ali, Gadhafi doesn't seem to have cultivated much in the way of friendship among his fellow Arabs, so that instead the speculations centered on various countries in the sub-Saharan region. But instead he stayed in Libya the whole time, so that eventually, as the rebel forces closed in on him in the last big hurdle, his hometown of Sirte that was so fiercely defended, he was eventually reduced to hiding in a drainage pipe, from which he was dragged out while still alive, much in the fashion of Saddam Hussein, who was pulled out of a previously prepared hidey-hole in the ground.

I had hoped that, like Saddam, Gadhafi would have a trial, so that we could hear what he had to say. He always had interesting things to say. But instead, after being captured alive, he was shot and killed almost on the spot, and so that was that.

As to who fired the fatal shots, there is, as of now, a bewildering variety of guesses, opinions, and what-not. with the headline suspects including crossfire between the various rebel groups, NATO, and even Gadhafi's own bodyguards.

Meanwhile the partnership between the U.S. news media and the Republican Party is hard at work trying to make sure that there is no suggestion that President Obama should get even a shred of credit for the ultimate disposal of the tyrannical Gadhafi, though that is hard to do, because the facts that are known should be obvious to even the dimmest of minds. But never mind. All that matters to those trying so hard to keep America's thought processes in a tight death grip of ignorance is that this comes at too inconvenient a moment, as typified by a remark make by the femina horriblis of the Republican President wanna-bes, the Bachmann woman, just a few days ago in the Las Vegas debate, to the effect that "Obama got us into Libya, now he's getting us into Africa," as if Libya and Uganda are not parts of the same continent.

The Repub-Media partnership has gotten so used to having the news reports all to itself and its scruffy Presidential aspirants, like a ghastly orchestra playing a piece consisting of only one theme, and that is that Obama is responsible for every ill in sight, and it can't have people playing any attention to this nevertheless all-important news item from Libya, because Gadhafi's end is full of significance for just about every other situation that is hanging fire in the oil-soaked Middle East.