"This is different"?

Discussing the public response to NBC's airing of the Cho video, Howard Kurtz had this to say:

In all the years I've been chronicling the media, I have rarely seen the tidal wave of resentment that has washed over television organizations that showed the now-infamous Cho video. In the minds of many Americans, this was a horribly offensive act, and no amount of explanation about the obligations of journalism is going to change that view.

There are certainly people who get mad when television airs those periodic Osama bin Laden tapes. There are those who think even a tough interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is giving "the enemy" a platform, or that Dan Rather shouldn't have sat down with Saddam on the eve of the Iraq war. But this is different. This is a lunatic who methodically planned mass murder and wanted to live in infamy.

Is Kurtz really implying in all seriousness that Saddam Hussein--the subject of a 1991 essay by Hans Magnus Enzensberger entitled, with very good reason, "Hitler Walks Again" (in English translation, it's in Zig Zag)--was not actually "a lunatic who methodically planned mass murder and wanted to live in infamy"? What a bizarre notion.