The emperor has no ... keffiyeh!

I can't wait for Col. Gadawful Gaddafi to flee the country ... like many other dictators, to Saudi Arabia.  And then when the revolution comes to Riyadh, I want these dictators to become nomads in the desert, and left to die without water!

I am simply amazed that the loony maniac was in power this long!  In India, Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution for almost two years as a way not to comply with the court's ruling that invalidated her electoral victory.  But, the pressure from within never really went away, and she was promptly booted out of office when she lifted the emergency rule.  It would have been one hell of a chaos if the anti-democratic government had lasted longer.

Gaddafi was no Fidel Castro to the young me.  At least Castro symbolized something--he consistently out-maneuvered the imperial America.  Of course, growing up resulted in a gradual disillusionment with Castro and now to a complete anti-Castro stance.  But, I could never understand Gaddafi's long tenure, and why the world tolerated him.  Oil is a pretty simplistic explanation.  After all, in the grand scheme of things, Libya's oil reserves and production, as Bogart's Rick said in Casablanca, "don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world" ... Libya is no Saudi Arabia or Iraq or Kuwait.

One hell of a crazy person Gaddafi was/is:

Qaddafi spent much of his career as one of the world's least discriminating sponsors of political unrest in Africa and worldwide. He is believed to have helped underwrite terrorists from the Black September group that conducted the 1972 attacks on the Munich Olympics to the IRA to Colombia's FARC to Carlos the Jackal. While he periodically seemed lucid and was charismatic enough to once inspire Nelson Mandela to name one of his off-spring after him, he has enough blood on his hands to earn him a place in the 20th Century madman hall of fame, admittedly not in the main wing with the really big time murderers like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, but in the wannabe annex. 
Of course, even were Qaddafi to fall tomorrow -- which wouldn't be too soon -- he will already have served longer than any Libyan leader in almost half a millennium and his tenure, which began with a  coup in 1969, will rank among the longest worldwide of the post-World War II era. In other words, his departure, when it comes will be long overdue.

BTW, in case you wonder about the two spellings of the name: Gaddafi and Qaddafi:

"Muammar Gaddafi" is the spelling used by TIME magazine, BBC News, the majority of the British press and by the English service of Al-Jazeera.^[99] The Associated Press, CNN, and Fox News use "Moammar Gadhafi". The Edinburgh Middle East Report uses "Mu'ammar Qaddafi" and the U.S. Department of State uses "Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi". The Xinhua News Agency uses "Muammar Khaddafi" in its English reports.^[100]
In 1986, Gaddafi reportedly responded to a Minnesota school's letter in English using the spelling "Moammar El-Gadhafi".^[101] The title of the homepage of algathafi.org reads "Welcome to the official site of Muammar Al Gathafi"