Usama Bin Laden: Sorry Little Narcissist...

Some really creepy videos accompany this piece by the New York Post's Andrea Peyser.

It is almost axiomatic that the world's most notorious murderers and tyrants are insatiable narcissists, and incidentally, it's also true that many happen to be frustrated artists.

Adolf Hitler was a failed painter, Mussolini and Napoleon wrote extremely bad plays, Frederick the Great wrote execrable poetry, Nero fancied himself a playwright and master musician, Saddam Hussein wrote romance novels. Usama Bin Laden apparently fancied himself as a modern-day, Islamic Cicero, giving political speeches on the evils of Capitalism and Western Culture, all the while watching himself of television (a product of Western Culture), and up to his armpits in perhaps one of the most iconic symbols of Western Culture; huge stores of Coca-Cola were found in every nook-and-cranny of his guilded Pakistani-suburban slum/ hideout.

The contradictions would be lost on Bin Laden, but then again, what do you expect? A Narcissist is usually the last person to get the joke, especially when he's the butt of it.

We know of Bin Laden's last days because he did us the dubious favor and had them videotaped for us. Like a Muslim John Kerry, who had himself followed about by movie cameras while collecting enough self-inflicted gunshot wounds to be sent home from Vietnam, Bin Laden was never far from the glare of the lights and the video camera, creating a perpetual image of himself as something he wasn't. In the end, Usama Bin Laden wasn't the towering figure of cold, calculating, pious rage and fear that he had so carefully portrayed himself to be; he was a sick man, dyeing his beard, all hopped up on Viagra and past glories, hiding for fear of his sorry little life. When his end came, he did not, as he had once vowed, gone down fighting in a glorious martyrdom; he hid behind is wife and children, and then was gunned down like a dog.

The Great Hero of the Islamic World, shot to death within the borders of the Islamic World's only nuclear power, living under the protection of the Pakistani military, immersed in the very swamp water of the Western World that he hated so much; television, mass media, Coca-Cola, Viagra, the 24-hour news cycle, Al'Jazeera, the Remote Control, making speeches about the dangers of Global Warming and Capitalism like a college freshman with a 960 SAT score after a kegger. Bin Laden had been captured long before by the very culture he so despised, and he had never even noticed it. Dipshit.

His little world, the one in which he was never out of range of the sound of his own voice, never very far from his own self-constructed image, was all that was left to him, and it consumed his last days on Earth.

Now, after a decade of being the biggest boogeyman in History, Usama Bin Laden became little more than a punchline to a very bad joke.

I have no sympathy for the man, and if there's one complaint on my part about this whole capture and execution routine, it's that Bin Laden wasn't hung by his heels in Times Square to get the full Mussolini Treatment, in front of the very television cameras that he craved so much.