One more badass middle-eastern dictator dragged out of the ever-popular Hiding Spot for Badass Middle-Eastern Dictators, a hole in the desert:
Muammar Gaddafi was killed by Libyan fighters he once scorned as “rats,” cornered, beaten and then shot in the head after his chaotic capture by fighters who overran his last redoubt on Thursday in his hometown of Sirte.
Two months after Western-backed rebels ended 42 years of eccentric, often bloody, one-man rule by capturing the capital Tripoli, his death and the fall of the final bastion ended a nervous hiatus for the new interim government, which is now set to declare formal “liberation” with a timetable for elections.
Is it Wrong that my first thought at hearing this news was “Long Oil!!!“? Heh.
Gaddafi was a tyrant and a monster, the very definition of a strong-man middle-eastern dictator: he won’t be missed. Except maybe in one respect… I, at least, will miss his entertaining fashion sense.
For all his volatility, in one respect Gadaffi was flawlessly reliable: he could always be counted on to stand out in a crowd. Flashy & Weird was his thing and he worked at it, you could tell. And he did it well, even standing off heavy competition in the Weird Eyewear and Weird Hair Divisions from North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il. Gadaffi dressed for excess, and he was good at it.
But in the end his sartorial splendour may well have been his undoing. Would the rebels have found him so quickly if he’d dressed like this?
