Saturday, October 30, 2004

The Osama Endorsement

I was struck yesterday by how genuinely obsessed the Corner Kids appeared to be in the twin questions of "who does Osama want to be president?" and "who will this tape help/hurt."

As for the first question, I find it mostly ridiculous to either claim to know or even care. I find it even more ridiculous that plenty of our media pontificators have, without any ability to know, have decided they can divine the will of bin Laden and al Qaeda. There are plenty of good arguments for believing that bin Laden is quite happy with Bush, and none, aside from Brooksian "he talks tough and looks manly in a flightsuit" arguments, against that idea. But, the question is both irrelevant and irresponsible. Frankly, I doubt he really gives a shit, and I don't give a shit what he thinks.

As for the second question, without any polling information to justify it, speculation by "responsible people" in the media is completely irresponsible. Not that it stopped them. And, doing so without reminding people of the relevant context, as E&P points out, is truly irresponsible. It's a throwback to the days when it was considered unpatriotic to question the might of Dear Leader, facts be damned. E&P explains it very simply:

One would think, however, that before the media helps re-elect the president by emphasizing the very subjective "strong on terrorism" analysis, they might pause to give equal or even added weight to the demonstrable fact that the tape reminds us that: 1) 9/11 happened on Bush's watch 2) Bush has not yet caught Bin Laden perhaps because he 3) switched his attention to Iraq where 4) we have contributed to the terrorist threat against us in numerous tragic ways, not to mention suffering more U.S. casualties (dead and injured) than we absorbed in 9/11.



...and, just to add, on the issue of Tora Bora shame on our media for regularly ignoring their own reporting on this subject.