By Prof. Michael Glennon —

“Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shared a laugh with a television news reporter moments after hearing deposed Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had been killed.

” ‘We came, we saw, he died,’ she joked when told of news reports of Qaddafi’s death by an aide in between formal interviews.”

CBS News, October 20, 2011

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”

―Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy 39 (1939)

Images courtesy of Reuters and The Daily Beast.