Pacific Views

i have to disagree with you, natasha. i think the osama tape will confirm dubya supporters in that support. but i doubt it will have much effect on the kerry vote -- if anything, the timing of the tape will be viewed with great suspicion -- and i doubt it will sway many undecided voters.

it's too little, too late. and obviously an october surprise -- for somebody.

I just don't know. It had 'Bush commercial' written all over it to me. I heard some of what he's said, but how does it hurt your re-election chances when bin Laden comes out and criticizes you? Could he not have just shut the **** up for another week?

I say that because most of the public will hear exactly this, and little more: bin Laden released a video where he criticized Bush.

If Kerry wins now, which he still could, it will be because he's every bit the superb closer everyone said he is. This is his chance to rise to a challenge, because that's what this will probably be spun as.

Anyway, it's nice to have two consecutive posts on the site with divergent views of the same event. I can't wait to find out what Mary thinks about it.

If Americans hear this comment from Osama and still vote for Bush, they're as stupid as he is evil: "It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the country would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone .. because he thought listening to a child discussing her goats was more important"

That's a quote straight from Osama bin Laden's latest tape, delivered to al Jazeera.

Tuesday can't come soon enough.

think about this: dubya's spent a huge part of his campaign talking about who can better win the war on terror. and there's been talk out of the administraton about how bin laden is on the run, and may even be dead.

so here we are, a couple of days ahead of the election, and not only is osama not dead, he looks pretty damn healthy. and he doesn't look like he made his video huddling in a cave someplace ... i mean, this is a guy who (as i recall) has to have dialysis.

so how effective has dubya been in dealing with the man who the prez identifies as the embodiment of the terrorist threat? not exactly material for a Bush/Cheney '04 ad ...

My take as I have written about it, if I may add my two cents here:

Ok, we have all watched the video and heard the news. Both sides in the presidential campaign are trying to shift the message to justify their election. One fact stands out: If George Bush was the right man for the job in fighting terrorism, how come after three years, Osama bin Laden is making videos?

It is as simple as that. Talking tough is not being tough. Saying you are the right man for the job, does not make it so. Bush has had his chance to fight terrorism. He has failed. Al Qaeda is spread out around the world at levels far greater than before 9/11. Terrorism is now flourishing in Iraq; where it did not exist before.

75% of al Qaeda's leaders are captured? What is the basis for this number? Does President Bush think that these people are not replaced? The reality is that George Bush has been a terrorist-recruitment dream come true. Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks have grown in membership because of current U.S. policies and current U.S. misguided efforts; favoring a fake war in Iraq over a battle in the mountains of Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Bush has alienated so large a portion of the world, that we fight this fight at less than full strength. Bush has wasted resources in Iraq that belonged in other places. Is this saying Democrats wanted Saddam Hussein to remain in power? Nonsense!! However, based on the Bush logic, I suppose we can say that George Bush supports Kim Jong-il, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei and Bashir Assad. After all, they remain in power today.

There are a lot of unknowns here. I think if a voter was leaning Kerry's way, they'll see the tape as confirmation of Bush taking his eye off the ball. Mission Unaccomplished! For the Bush leaner, their response will be how dare Osama dictate to them who to vote for. There are a lot of spite voters out there. Remember the friendly responses the Guardian received. I doubt it will have much impact though. Most people are clearly in one camp or the other by now. Surprised Osama didn't say Happy Halloween. Seeing him is always very haunting experience.

For me, this highlights a dilemma for the world which transcends Bush versus Kerry. It will probably sound crazy, so call it the Paranoid Perspective.

Bush and Kerry are both Skull & Bones, which is evidently a gateway to the Cold-War intelligence oligarchy which has been managing the world, by my estimation, since 1945. What conspiracy theorists miss is that this elite (whatever you think of it) is very much on the defensive. Governments don't just tell lies in order to justify military adventurism; they also tell soothing lies during times of crisis, such as terrorist attack. For the USA, I think the primordial deception came in 1963. Oswald's KGB connections were obscured in order to hide the fact that the president had just been assassinated by a Soviet agent, and there was nothing that could be done. In the 1970s and 1980s, the forbidden truth was Soviet sponsorship of international terrorism; in the 1990s, it was Iraqi sponsorship of al Qaeda. As the terrorism grew more destructive, the cover-ups grew more egregious, and now we have the Orwellian situation of "we had to go to war with Iraq but we don't dare tell you the real reason" - and neither candidate is going to spill the beans any time soon.

So the dilemma for us paranoids is not Bush versus Kerry - it's four more years of Skull & Bones, whoever wins. It is: do we want the truth? Because the price might be the destruction of the CIA, even as al Qaeda remains at large. Al Qaeda itself is a secret world government of sorts. Its leaders think geopolitically, just as their Ivy-League rivals do. The choice for the world is: who do we prefer, the old boss or the challenger?

Well, reading over most of the comments here and other posts all over the left blogosphere, my opinion seems to be an outlier.

But again, my main concern is over whose spin sticks, and it's been hard to go wrong these last four years assuming that the Republican talking points will be the dominant narrative. Everyone knew what they were going to say the minute they first heard that there was a new tape out, and the talking point machines haven't disappointed.

mitch p. - Ummm... that may be the nuttiest thing posted on this site since, well, ever. Thanks for the chuckles.

Perhaps you can archive the Mitch P. posting in a Comment Hall of Fame. I read it, splashed some water on my face, read it again, went, "huh," and then read it once more before I sent it to a cryptographer to look for hidden messages to the alien masses gathered in the cornfields of America waiting to attack.