Everyone has to die someday, it's how you die that matters, like James Dean said, live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse, which leads to habits of highly effective dead dictators.

Habit Number One: Know when to leave the stage. 

Look at Gaddafi, ass-raped and shot in the torso, dragged through the streets, not a pretty picture, and not James Dean: live fast he got, but he waited too long, and so, didn't leave a good looking corpse.

Habit Number Two: See Habit Number One, and when all the people you've killed family members come close, use Romney's Swiss banker to move your ass before it's too late.

Swiss bank accounts were made for dictators, loved by people like Mobutu, famous for refusing to pay his army when the CIA cut his funds off, precisely so that the streets of Kinshasha would run with blood when they rioted, and I know people who saw that, and they say naked people painted in white ran down the streets which literally ran with blood.

Mobutu, he had some style, and didn't get eaten by his enemies, always a plus in some parts of the world.

Give old Sese Mobutu some credit, not only for setting up the Rumble in the Jungle, after having used CIA to kill Patrice Lumumba, for good reason of course, the dumb commie, but also to have a Concord on retainer, to land anytime he wanted in a specially carved airport in the jungle informally known as Heart of Darknessville.

Habit Number Three: Have a good escape plan.

Saddam's wasn't too bad, as to avoid being whacked by the B-1s dropping JDAMs, but then the dumbass went and hid in hole just the size of a grave.

What was that all about but bad juju?

What you need is an Idi Amin plan, where you take 200 of your closest wives and a billion dollars and snort coke all day long in Saudi Arabia: "Who us take in Idi Amin?"

Saudi, now that's the place to go, or better, that island in the Gulf where the Muslims say "What happens here stays here." They say no one ever sleeps on that island.

Every dictator needs a villa on that island, as the escape plan, which does everyone a lot of good, for habit number four.

Habit Number Four: Know when you've lost, like Bashar al Assad, and don't use nerve gas on people.

Leaving a good looking corpse isn't just literal, but metaphorical, like some kind of reputation in history other than, "He was losing power, didn't want to do that, and used VX on a whole bunch of people, and then there was a snatch and grab raid followed by a gruesome violation of his entire genetic lineage." Not good, see Muammar.

Habit Number Five: Write a lot of jibberish when you were alive, as that keeps your reputation alive, and therefore keeps your family alive too, even the third generation numbnuts like Kim Kong Wong Dwarf Un. He's still got nuclear weapons because his granddad and dad had a lot of ghostwriters writing jibberish, the next best thing to authoring it yourself.

Habit Number Six: Know a good mortician.

Look at Lenin, still look waxy after all of those years. Being stuffed and mounted is a good habit of a dead dictator, but only if your mortician doesn't botch the job, so that ... well, in the interests of good taste we'll stop there, leading to best habit of effective dead dictators number seven.

Habit number Seven: Don't underestimate the power of ideals in this world, or you will answer in the next, forever, and worse, just in case that wasn't in the cards, the more bad karma you earned, the more likely it is that your end in this one is gruesome in character, so very not James Dean.

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