and you thought uday was dead. this just in off the ap wire:

¶ LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) _ Sen. Jim Bunning's re-election campaign issued an apology after Bunning said a potential opponent looks like one of Saddam Hussein's sons.
¶ Bunning made the comment about state Sen. Daniel Mongiardo during a speech at a Republican event March 20. Mongiardo will face Bunning in the November election if he wins the Democratic primary as expected.
¶ "We're sorry if this joke, which got a lot of laughs, offended anyone," Bunning's campaign manager, David Young, said Wednesday.
¶ Bunning apparently did not compare Mongiardo specifically to either of Saddam's two sons, Odai or Qusai. The brothers were killed in a firefight with U.S. soldiers July 22 last year.
¶ A spokesman for Mongiardo said he had not received an apology from Bunning and called on Bunning's campaign to make public the only known videotape of the speech.
¶ "A halfhearted apology from his campaign manager is no apology at all," Mongiardo spokesman Eric Niloff said. "Jim Bunning needs to come clean, show the people of Kentucky the tape and let them decide whether or not that's funny."
¶ Young declined to release the tape.
¶ In his 2002 campaign, Mongiardo accused Republican Johnnie L. Turner of using bigotry and racism in an ad that showed Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. Mongiardo said the ad made a point of showing that he and Atta both had dark eyes, black hair and olive complexions.
¶ Bunning, 72, is seeking a second term. He is opposed in the May 18 primary election by former state Sen. Barry Metcalf, whom he defeated in the 1998 primary.
¶ Bunning, a former major league pitcher and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, has a history of making controversial remarks as a lawmaker. In 1997, he apologized for saying on a radio show that downtown Louisville was devastated by flooding because the city failed to close its floodgates in time, which was untrue.
¶

 
Dear Uday,
Just found this on the associated press wire. So I see you do like Bushies daughters but what's up with the heroin?

¶ BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) _ His personal zoo has lions, cheetahs and a bear. His storehouse has $1 million in fine wines, liquor and heroin. His house has Cuban cigars, cases of champagne and downloaded pictures of prostitutes.
¶ While most Iraqis suffered under the U.N. sanctions that drove their country into poverty, Saddam Hussein's eldest son Odai lived a life of fast cars, expensive liquor and easy women, a tour through his bombed house showed Monday.
¶ The walls of a gym were plastered with photographs of women downloaded from the Internet _ "the biggest collection of naked women I'd ever seen," said Army Capt. Ed Ballanco, of Montville, N.J. "It looked like something at the Playboy Mansion."
¶ Among the photos were those of Jenna and Barbara Bush, President Bush's 21-year-old daughters, "dressed up very nice in evening clothes," Ballanco said, adding that soldiers took them "to protect the president."
¶ Odai Hussein's compound is in a back corner of the Presidential Palace compound, a small city that boasts six-lane avenues, traffic lights and a hospital. U.S. soldiers who now occupy the grounds say they believe Odai's portion included a house, a warehouse, a gym, a gaudy house for women and a zoo.
¶ Scattered among the debris from a bomb that tore through Odai's house and exploded in a bunker below lay stationery with Odai's name in gold lettering, photographs of Odai and dozens of copies of Odai's doctoral dissertation, "The World After the Cold War."
¶ The house also indicated Odai's sybaritic side, something Iraqi dissenters have told of for decades: a hunger for alcohol, drugs and lots and lots of women.
¶ There were bottles of Cuervo 1800 tequila, Danska vodka and Delamain cognac, as well as Chimay, Corona and Miller Genuine Draft beers.
¶ There were bags and boxes of pills and medicines everywhere _ ginseng sexual fortifiers, heartburn medication and Prozac _ and an Accu-Rite HIV Antibodies Screening Test Kit in Odai's office.
¶ An e-mail dated Dec. 22, 2000, and signed by a Dr. Jean-Jacques Barrault, instructed "His Excellency" to undergo electrotherapy for a knee injury and to swim and ride horses for no more than 40 minutes a day. It prescribed a regimen of daily exercise.
¶ In 1996, gunmen sprayed bullets at Odai's Porsche, leaving him with a bullet in his spine that forced him to walk with a cane.
¶ The house was filled with boxes from handguns and piles of magazines, including "Guns and Ammo" and "Guns," as well as Spanish car magazines and catalogs of JetSkis.
¶ Soldiers said they found receipts for sports cars signed by Odai. The underground parking garage and indoor swimming pool were destroyed by bombing that gutted the center of the house.
¶ In the next-door storehouse, were roomfuls of alcohol, tobacco and firearms. Ballanco estimated the alcohol's worth at $1 million.
¶ There were "Dom Perignon, French wines _ all appellation controlee, some 30-40 years old _ a lot of very good brandy, a lot of good whiskey," Ballanco said. "There were boxes of Cuban cigars that said `Odai Saddam Hussein' on them, hundreds of them. My guys smoked them."
¶ He said there were also six bags of heroin. He didn't know how much they held.
¶ "There are UNICEF boxes in there with kids' school supplies meant for the children of Iraq, yet these jerks took it," said Maj. Kent Rideout, 39, of San Antonio, Texas.
¶ Odai's obsession with sex was evident everywhere. The house was adorned with paintings of naked women, as well as bundles of Internet printouts of what appeared to be prostitutes, complete with handwritten ratings of each. One black book listed hundreds of women's names and phone numbers.
¶ One e-mail printout was a complaint from a woman that she was having a difficult time finding heterosexual men in Europe.
¶ "Darling, babe, it's not good timing to send me sexy attachment. OH BOY where am I going to get one guy?" it read in English.
¶ Odai's bed was painted in gold trim, and his bathroom featured a sink and tub fitted with fixtures in a swan motif.
¶ One house apparently wasn't big enough for Odai's women. To one side, a gaudy house filled with bedrooms that is now a camp for U.S. soldiers appeared to once have housed women.
¶ It had statuettes of couples in foreplay, and couches everywhere with fluffy pillows. And it boasted another swimming pool, with a bar.
¶ "The pink and the cheesiness suggest it was a concubines' house," Ballanco said.
¶ Behind the house was a pen holding two cheetahs, five lion cubs and a young bear.
¶ Three German shepherds who guarded the compound have been adopted by soldiers, who feed them military rations. For the wilder animals, soldiers have been throwing in sheep from a nearby pen, said Spc. Pete Adams, of Lexington, Va.
¶ A feeding on Sunday, he said, "looked like something from the National Geographic Channel."


Let's stay in touch,
Michael

 
Dear Uday,
I have to say I'm very worried about you. It seems you disappeared without a trace. Are you in Damascus or buried beneath a ton of rubble? Please if you can get on the Internet, write me and let me know. Okay? At this point, I don't think my letters to you will do much to advance world peace, it seems like the war is pretty much over. But who knows George W. might just invade Syria and maybe that's where you're at. I'm not too keen on George W. invading Syria -- not that I'm too keen on Syria and I was never too keen on Iraq. I mean, no offense but your pops is kind of an asshole. But that's the thing George W. is an asshole too and a whole lot more dangerous. Right now, those Bushies in Washington are dancing around like they own the world and they have to get a reality check. I just worry that reality check will come in the form of another terrorist attack that will kill a lot of innocent people and then let them justify stripping civil liberties and attacking other countries. It would just play into there hands. Boy, what a mess we have here.
Try to stay out of harms way,
Michael

 
Dear Uday,
Where the hell are you? Are you still alive? Shit hit the fan pretty quickly down their in Baghdad, didn't it. I don't even know what's up. I mean what was the game plan? Was there any strategy? I mean even I could the U.S. Army rolling in like that but I thought you guys maybe had something up your sleeve. What happened? Or are we still waiting for the last hurrah?

I don't want this letter to be kind of all gloomy and down but I realize there's, at least, a possibility that you are dead. Which means there would be very little point in writing you. I'm going to keep on trying though, I mean, I took the trouble to set up this blog and all. And I was feeling like I was making some headway. I guess if you do die I could keep writing and just take this weblog to a higher spiritual plain.

Best of luck,
Michael

 
Dear Uday,
A co-worker just sent me this off the Associated Press wire:

"Elsewhere in the capital, U.S. forces steadily expanded their reach, securing a military airport, capturing a prison, setting fire to a Republican Guard barracks. Milburn said the house of Saddam's son Uday was on fire, apparently hit by a bomb."

Dude your house is on fire! What are you going to do? Has it occured to you that it may be some kind of karmic pay back to all the bad shit with the grasshoppers (see below).

Hang in there Ud -- you don't mind if I call you Ud, do you?

Let me know,
Michael

 
Dear Uday,
You know with all the death and destruction in Baghdad these days, I can't help but wonder if you maybe aren't getting enough quality time with your pops, Saddam. I mean I think it's really important to get some time in with your dad especially considering he might not be around much longer. Actually, you may not even be around much longer if what I read in the American press is correct. I saw something really disturbing today that said U.S. officials didn't know if they had killed you (and your pops) or not. I mean, who am I going to write to if that happens. All my efforts to promote world peace in my own small way will have come to naught. Well, Uday, let me know if you can because I'm kind of concerned. For that reason I'm going to try to include an e-mail link on this page. At least, that way I might get some answers to my letters. By the way, do you speak English?
Let me know,
Michael

 
Dear Uday,
You tell me, is the game up or what? Shit looks pretty bad there in Bahgdad and if I were you I'd be majorly bummed. But who knows? Maybe you guys have a back-up plan? Or you're just luring the coalition forces into a false sense of confidence and then you're going to zap them. Otherwise, I figure you're probably done for and I want to ask you was it worth it? I mean taunting the Bush family like that? You know how vicious those Texas blue bloods can get when you jerk their chain don't you? Or maybe that's it, it's one of those cross cultural confusions, back in the Arab world it's considered kosher to cheat and retreat. I mean I don't want to condemn the whole Arab world, but I had this landlord of Arab descent who kind of pulled the same kind of game with me. He'd agree to all this shit and never do it, then when I pressed him he'd say he was working on it and maybe throw me a bone. After awhile I kind of wished I had a really big army and a lot of cruise missle so that I could teach him a lesson. And take my word for it, I'm a much nicer guy than George W. Bush. I guess what I'm saying is we all need a little more understanding of just what it is about our own particular culture that pisses the other cultures off so we can all just get along.
Keep in touch,
Michael

 
Dear Uday,
I'm feeling much better today really up and full of energy. How about you? I hear the coalition forces are right outside of town now. Though your information minister said it's "an illusion." Who to believe? But isn't it all just an illusion -- I seem to remember some Shakespeare quote, maybe from the Tempest, about it all being like one big dream, but the actual wording escapes me. I'm sure you'll forgive the lapse, or maybe not. Some of the research I've been doing seems to suggest you're a pretty cruel dude. That's right cruel not cool. And I'd like to point out Uday that being cruel is definetely not cool. So be cool dude. Though I'd be the first to admit its hard with all the bombs and tanks and artillery fire all around you.

Anyway, Uday, let me get on to my next point, some of my friends who know I've been writing you have been prodding me to be a little more direct with you, to get to the point. They want me to say Uday stop the violence! But, you know something Uday, I'm not sure you could even if you wanted to. And I'm not just talking about influencing your dad. You see, I think George W. is a crazy motherfucker -- and I don't mean to offend you're honor, because I've heard on CNN that honor is a big deal in Arab culture, but he's a lot more dangerous than you and your father will ever be. And, worse yet, he really wants your hide! That's why I'm not coming right out and saying stop the violence, because I don't really think there's much you really can do. I mean you could go a little more gently into that good night, but even Dylan Thomas advised against that. And we all known how he went into that good night -- 40 shots of whiskey at the White Horse Tavern. Gently not! So all I can say is try not to make it a bigger mess than you really have to.
All the best,
Michael