Saddam and Whitney

First Bobby Brown, now Saddam leeching off of Whitney’s good name.

Hussein, 65, who has run Iraq since the mid-1970s, has not done any campaigning in person. In fact, he has not been seen in public by diplomats or foreign journalists since December 2000, when he stood in the cold for 13 hours to watch a military parade, repeatedly firing a hunting rifle with one hand. But he is ubiquitous in the media, which are controlled by the government. His picture is almost always on the front pages of newspapers here, and television stations have been continually showing clips of him waving to admiring crowds.

His campaign song, Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” has been getting lots of airtime.

Does Whitney have a say in this? Does Saddam know the song is actually about a parting of the ways? How perfect is that? I am reminded of our post touching upon inappropriate wedding songs. Perhaps Saddam’s grasp of English is less than it might be. It’s kind of like Ronald Reagan latching onto “Born In the U.S.A.” even though Springsteen’s song dealt with anger toward the land of his birth.

The WaPo article is actually about the presidential election in Iraq, where the outcome is not freighted with drama:

When Iraqis go to the polls Tuesday to endorse Saddam Hussein for another seven-year term as president, they will walk past banners exhorting them to vote “Yes, yes, yes for Saddam,” they will cast their votes in buildings festooned with his portrait and they will deposit ballots — coded to allow authorities to identify a voter’s decision — into boxes decorated with slogans of admiration for their leader.

As a consequence, the only real suspense about the outcome is whether Hussein will exceed the 99.96 percent affirmation he received in the last election.

“God willing, this time it will be 100 percent,” said Kifah Kazem, 43, a sporting club manager. “It will be an expression of our love for our president.”

….”The political and international circumstances, and the American and Zionist threats, have given the referendum a new meaning,” Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf said today. “It’s a blow to these criminals.”

Or as Kazem put it, the outcome “will be like a fork in the eyes of [President] Bush.”

But Saddam will always love you.

Although government officials contend people have the freedom to vote no, those who do so can be identified by the government because ballots are assigned numbers that correspond to a voter’s identity card.

“It would be crazy for anyone to vote no,” a Western diplomat here said.

In the previous referendum, in 1995, about 1,200 ballots did not indicate a yes vote. It is not clear how many of those were no votes and what, if anything, happened to those voters.

“I Will Always Love You”

If I should stay
I would only be in your way.
So I’ll go but I know
I’ll think of you
Every step of the way.

And I will always love you.
I will always love you.
You my darling you, mmm …

Bittersweet memories,
That is all I’m taking with me.
So goodbye, please don’t cry.
We both know I’m not what you, you need.

And I will always love you.
I will always love you.

Would that it were so Saddam, would that it were so.