What's a guy gotta' do to...?

Get sick, win a trip to Paris! Don't get too excited though, because this deal's usually only open to dictators and terrorists, folk the French find it advantageous to curry favor with. In this specific case we're talking about Yasser Arafat.

It's 'round about this point I usually hear an objection to labeling Arafat a terrorist. These objections never cease to amaze me. Did not Arafat personally orchestrate the second intifadeh, the main hallmark of which was the bombing of Israeli civilians? Was he not the leader of the PLO and Black September? Did he not personally order the murder of U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel Jr.? It shouldn't take the deaths of that many innocents in order to take this relatively small truth-in-labeling measure.

I even get static from my wife on this. I joked to her that maybe Arafat was feigning illness after tiring of staring at the walls of his crumbling Ramallah compound for thirty months. You know, holding the thermometer next to the kerosene lamp until he hears the nurse coming back -- that sort of thing. My wife admonished me to "be nice." "The man might be dying!" And that's bad how, exactly? I asked her whether this schadenfreude prohibition is also in effect for Osama bin Laden. Or how about Saddam? She hasn't ruled on that yet.

On the flip side, it also amazes me how little respect other figures are accorded, despite their achievements on behalf of vast swaths of humanity. My computer's background image at work is a small, plain black-and-white photo of Ronald Reagan with Margaret Thatcher. This once earned a derisive snort from a coworker, which begs the question, "Just how many millions of people does one have to free from tyrranical government to earn Windows wallpaper status?" Sure, Reagan may be a hero to millions in Poland and the Czech Republic, but apparently my coworker has higher standards than that. He's probably waiting for the right rock band to catch his fancy...