You can be sure I won’t be seeing Dreamgirls again on New Year’s Eve. [I told you to stop reviewing. You'll never work in Hollywood again.-ed. Not with anyone connected with Dreamgirls.]

Surfing the ‘net today in the aftermath of the Saddam hanging I see the usual suspects decrying the the dictator’s execution in the predictable manners (Hello, Robert Scheer). What interests me more are the objections of capital punishment purists, because I can sympathize with their position. But I think their orthodox views are misguided in this instance. They may even have been blinded by a form of narcissism, by wanting to be considered “good.”

I almost always oppose capital punishment for the usual moral and practical reasons. But in the instance of political mass murderers like Hitler, Stalin and, yes, Saddam, I think public safety vastly outweighs any ideological considerations. Life imprisonment is a great risk with such people. These men (and those like them) have literally millions of adherents who would like nothing more than to free them so they can return to power and kill again. And this is not just the stuff of a Hollywood movie when a serial killer escapes and might add another twenty corpses to his dossier. The numbers here are staggering. The death of Stalin (whether natural or encouraged) more or less ended the horrors of the Gulag. An assassination of Hitler in the thirties would have saved tens of millions. Does anyone really think that an incarcerated Saddam would never be freed? I wouldn’t want to bet on it.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s oped in the WaPo today is worth reading as an exercise in statesmanship. Interesting too are the words he uses to describe himself at the bottom of the piece:

The writer is an Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut.

Bravo.

Yesterday afternoon, after wrapping up our vacation with a couple of pleasant hours in the Elliot Bay Book Company, Sheryl, Madeleine and I started back to our hotel to pick up our bags and head home to LA. We were with our friend and my Pajamas colleague Gerard. He proposed we take a cab; he would drop us by the hotel before continuing to his home.

We found one quickly. It was driven by an African guy. We had to instruct him about the location of our hotel; it was new. In the course of this I asked him where he was from. Kenya, he said. But then quickly added he was Somali. Many Somalians live in Kenya.

Ah, Somalia. Immediately the three adults in the car perked up. We acknowledged we knew there was big trouble in that country, the attack from Ethiopia on the ICU, etc. To our surprise, our driver immediately launched into a vitriolic attack on Al Qaeda. They were evil violent men, hijacking Islam across the globe. He had details of their infiltration of Somalia from a phone call he had made the previous night, how they were using Saudi money, etc. Thousands of people were being murdered by these Wahhabis for no reason. He was obviously following the situation closely. Al Qaeda was a danger to all mankind, he said.

It was a refreshing to hear this view from a Moslem taxi driver in Seattle. He was obviously pleased that we recognized the travails of his people too. So he continued with his explication of what was behind this terrible situation – how the Moslem religion could have been taken over by these violent forces. Someone was behind the rise of this Saudi Wahhabism . The answer, he said, was Israel. It was all an Israeli plot. They were behind the Wahhabis.

Suddenly our hearts sank. How could a man who seemed so reasonable, so knowledgeable, say something so obviously crazy?

Just then we were at our hotel. Sheryl and I left the cab, stunned. I phoned Gerard from the airport. What had the man said on the way to his place? Gerard – wisely – had let him continue. There was no point in fighting with a man like that. Better to learn how his mind worked. Gerard simply inquired why the Israelis would want to back Al Qaeda when Al Qaeda was sworn to destroy Israel. The man replied by talking about his childhood, his Islamic education. He had learned about the Jews from the Koran. That was the truth, of course.

Taxi driving in Seattle. So it goes.

Of course, we’re talking about pizza pie here, which is making a comeback since Wolfgang Puck ripped it away from Napoli and put some salmon and cream cheese on it, then added just about anything else you can think of. The results then were, well, interesting for a while, but now serious pie is back. We tried it last night in Seattle at Tom Douglas’ latest eatery – Serious Pie. If you’re within three miles or so of the place, don’t miss it. I don’t know what it is with this Douglas guy but he seems to do almost everything well … even Greek food. The pizzas at Serious Pie were some of the best I’ve eaten.

Next stop: Mozza in LA. This is the new Nancy Silverton-Mario Batali upscale pizza joint, which is currently the hottest seat in my home town. I have tried to get in several times at weird hours, but so far no luck. I take this to be good news for my waistline, since sooner or later the traffic will lighten up and I will find myself in front of one (or six) of their pies.

OOPS: Typo in the above. I meant three hundred, not three, miles from the restaurant. I wrote that in a hurry before catching a plane back to LA. Note to promoguy: I like Patsy D’Amores too. THere’s a branch in the Farmers Market, as you probably know.

I have comments up on Babel and The Pursuit of Happyness at Pajamas.

… from a Jewish agnostic who has learned to respect Christians more than ever in the last few years.

Above is the Freestone Inn, Mazama WA where we are spending a few days, cross country skiing or nursing bruises and strains from same. It’s a spectacular place with (this year) a huge amount of snow. Also, there are no cell phone communications, a Zen lesson at Christmastime for this “connection freak.” But there’s plenty to eat, of course, and a bottle of Leonetti merlot to be enjoyed with the inn’s Christmas dinner.

I didn’t sleep well last night. Part of the reason was I was in a hotel room in a new bed, but the other was Sandy Berger. I was up late reading the PDF file of his investigation we posted this morning on Pajamas. Everything we had heard about him was true – and more, possibly a lot more. I kept tossing in my bed, trying to puzzle out what kind of man behaves in the manner he did. Surely, a coward – but a coward of a special sort.

The more you read of the file the more you realize that there are many unanswered questions about Berger’s behavior that the government has not chosen to disclose (if they know). We cited some obvious ones with the PJ post, but so much of the file has been blacked out, there may be whole areas not yet imagined. What interests me here, however, are not the facts (I don’t have the sources for that), nor even the nearly obscene leniency of his sentence. (After reading even the redacted version, I can’t believe this man will have his security clearance back in three years. What judge allowed that?)

No, what interests me is Berger the man. What manner of moral reprobate could act they way he did after some three thousand people were murdered by Islamist terrorists. No doubt the inner Sandy has a raft of rationalizations, varied ways of justifying his criminal behavior to himself whether he was defending his own actions or Clinton’s or both. (It would be interesting to know, wouldn’t it?) Perhaps Berger is even sophisticated enough (though I suspect not) to reference EM Forster’s famous dictum: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” But the problem is – Berger wasn’t just betraying his country, he was betraying real, living human beings, past and potential victims of terrorism. As we learned on 9-11, it doesn’t matter what country they come from. It is a betrayal of humanity as much as it is a betrayal of our country (though of course it is that.)

So “Pants” Berger is a coward of a special kind – a character out of a novel, something for a modern Tolstoy perhaps, a refined species of modern narcissist. He can also be looked at as an example of another highly-reviled category – traitor. I don’t use that word loosely at all either. I don’t regard Cindy Sheehan, for example, as a traitor or Michael Moore or any of those people, much as I disagree with them. They have vigorously espoused their opinions in a free society. Sandy Berger smuggled top secret documents out of our National Archives. We may never know what that was about, what was in them (or in their notes) or why he did it. He is a traitor. They are not.

… read Ron Rosenbaum’s latest post. He spells out why Islamism is more dangerous than communism ever was – and asks for a solution? So far there have not been many suggestions.

As for me, I’m going on vacation…. cross country skiing in the Methow Valley. Considering that I don’t think I can handle more than two hours a day of the sport and that our hotel has broadband, I suspect there’ll be some blogging, even some photos of the Great White North (or northish). I’m going to try to enjoy myself and not obsess on Ahmadinejad and footnote 55 (see Rosenbaum). Maybe while skiing I’ll come up with an idea … but don’t hold your breath.

According to our good friends at Variety, this year’s Academy Awards are up for grabs with no clear front runner. It’s nice to be voting in an election for once where my vote actually counts (even if the election is not quite as significant as, say, the presidency of Iran). Nevertheless, voting in the Oscars can be something of a chore. It used to be (when I first joined the Acad over 20 years ago) that I was all excited to vote in the awards. But those kinds of honorifics get tired fast and now I … and I bet a number of Academy members if they admitted it … resent having to watch a lot of movies that don’t really want to see, if only to feel vaguely honest about their votes.

And now that I’m grousing, let me complain about a great perk that has vanished. It also used to be that you could be a hero to friends and family lending out (or giving away) the tapes and DVDs sent out as screeners by the studios to all Academy members. No more. In this era of online piracy, most of the DVDs have digital watermarks with our names on it. One poor sucker in the acting division wound up with a $60,000 dollar fine (yes, you read that correctly) when some copies with his watermark turned up in Hong Kong. Kind of gets your attention. So you keep the discs close to home. And they keep coming – like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. In our house, with my Acad membership and Sheryl and my WGA memberships, we have wound up, for some reason, with five copies of World Trade Center. Maybe we should use them for coasters. [Sake coasters. They come in sets of five, according to the Japanese tradition.-ed. Very goooood.]