Benito Mussolini, Bin Laden’s burial at sea, and Mr. Wu

So Osama Bin Laden was buried at sea, swiftly so as to not offend the 24 hour deadline imposed by Islam.  I was reminded of a kid from my neighborhood growing up that brought tantalizing black and white photos on the school bus, at least to neighborhood boys.  The old crinkled photographs seemed decades old, and the kid said they were his grandfather’s.  They showed people hanging dead upside down by their feet as a mob below scorned the pair.  To elementary school kids before the Internet, these photos scared the stuffing out of us – no fascism in our future!  The people in the photographs were Benito Mussolini and his mistress, caught, executed and strung up for all to see in Milan.  The spectacle accelerated the collapse of what was left of fascist resistance in Italy.

I’m not saying that Bin Laden’s corpse should have suffered a similar fate, though I suspect a sizable number of Americans wouldn’t have cared if the body was given to Mr. Wu.  What seems odd is the announcement of the deliberate emphasis about how well Bin Laden was treated.  As with so many things about this bunch, it is that odd emphasis again.