After my experience with The American Prospect, I’m sympathetic to Spencer Ackerman, who was fired by The New Republic after coming into conflict with TNR’s maddening pro-Iraq war politics. (Unfortunately, he signed on with TAP afterward, which is far more dogmatic than TNR.)

But Ackerman takes his newfound freedom from editorial constraint too far in an unhinged post on his new personal blog:

Read the names of the dead below. Ask yourself if a cynical show trial was worth the life of a single one of them.

Bush said, with no evident awareness:

Today, Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial — the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime.

Fair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule. It is a testament to the Iraqi people’s resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people’s determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.

Bush is a torturer, so he wouldn’t recognize a fair trial if he observed one. (I surely hope Baltasar Garzon will one day instruct him in what a fair trial looks like.) As Al Gore once observed, he dragged the name of the United States through Saddam Hussein’s torture prison. The idea that Bush’s hypocrisy and deception could force one to divert attention from the death of Saddam is a disgusting thing, but yet the coward who decrees an outcome and calls it justice demands condemnation. Perhaps the right thing to say is: One down, one to go.

However flawed the Iraqi legal process may have been, there’s just no justification for the last line “One down, one to go,” which implicitly compares Bush to Saddam and could be read to suggest that Bush should be executed next.

Update 1/2 7:03 AM: To clarify, the issue of why Ackerman was fired is complicated; see the New York Observer piece I linked above for more. I’m specifically sympathetic to Ackerman’s claim to have been constrained in his writing and reporting by his disagreement with the magazine over the war. I don’t condone his other (alleged) transgressions.