Hooray!  Charles Manson is dead!  Excerpt:

Charles Manson, a small-time car thief with wild eyes, had the monstrous ability to bend followers to unspeakable evil.

He used that ability to remake himself into perhaps the most notorious mass murderer in California history, terrorizing Southern California in 1969 with a string of nine savage slayings — including that of a promising young actress named Sharon Tate — that earned him a death sentence and made his name synonymous with depraved wickedness.

Manson, who spent the last 48 years of his life behind bars, died Sunday night at a Kern County hospital, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said. He was 83.

The prison agency said Manson died of natural causes at 8:13 p.m. He had been housed at California State Prison in Corcoran from 1989 until falling ill several days ago.

As I’ve noted before, when someone dies, you should find something good to say about them.  In this case as in a few others, the only comment I can make is “he’s dead.  Good.”

Manson and his cult followers were some of most truly, irredeemably evil people that recent history has produced.  The only sad part of this episode is that it took this damn long for Manson to be shuffled off this mortal coil; were there any cosmic justice, once the death penalty was out of the picture for Manson, he should have died of pancreatic cancer or something else suitably painful and torturous.  Instead, he was maintained at taxpayer expense for decades.

But he’s gone now.  And that, True Believers, is manifestly a Good Thing.