It's a travesty that an evil, unrepentant terrorist like Yasser Arafat got to die in his sleep.

CNN's graphic is also particularly disgusting.

Will Osama bin Laden get similar treatment when we finally send him to meet his maker?

The man was a terrorist. He was responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people. And CNN comes up with a fawning graphic similar to what they used for Ronald Reagan?

And it gets worse.

I've made the mistake of watching CNN's coverage and we had the following statement by anchor Aaron Brown:

John King (on phone): So now the question is, will the new Palestinian leadership have the credibility with the Palestinian people, have the courage to move forward? What will be the timetable, how willing will they be to sit down with the (Ariel) Sharon government? How willing, in exchange, will the Sharon government...

Brown: That's exactly right. I mean, we talk about the pressures on the president (he's referring to Arafat), there's also pressures on the Sharon government. Mr. Arafat, President Arafat was a good and convenient villan, if you will, for the Sharon government to do as it wished and now that has left the table. [emphasis added]

The guy was a terrorist!!! Can you get that through your thick head??? What the Sharon government has done is nothing more than trying to defend its citizens -- Jew and Arab alike. Arafat wasn't a "convenient" villan -- he was a villan.

Can anyone really see Brown talking about bin Laden's death this way? I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd be surprised if Arafat wasn't responsible for more murders of innocents over a longer period of time than bin Laden has.

For the record: Fox News' is a bit better, not nearly as sugar-coated.

*UPDATE* A couple of hours after I first posted this, CNN corrected its error.

This is more appropriate play, from an editorial standpoint, for a dead terrorist.