Please let the mainstream media pick this up...
NY DAILY NEWS
"We want people to think 'terrorism' for the last four days," said a Bush-Cheney campaign official. "And anything that raises the issue in people's minds is good for us."
A senior GOP strategist added, "anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush."
He called it "a little gift," saying it helps the President but doesn't guarantee his reelection.
The talk about being "free persons" (ahrar) and fighting for "liberty" (hurriyyah) for the Muslim "nation" (ummah) seems to me a departure. The word "hurriyyah" or freedom has no classical Arabic or Koranic resonances and I don't think it has played a big role in his previous statements.In the end, history may give Bush credit for pushing democracy in the Middle East, something that we should have done a long time ago. But history will also give him credit for being an incompetent idiot.
I wonder if Bin Laden has heard from the field that his association with the authoritarian Taliban has damaged recruitment in the Arab world and Iraq, where most people want an end to dictatorship and do not want to replace their secular despots with a religious one. The elections in Pakistan (fall 2002) and Afghanistan went better than he would have wanted, and may have put pressure on him. He may now be reconfiguring the rhetoric of al-Qaeda, at least, to represent it as on the side of political liberty. I am not saying this is sincere or might succeed; both seem to me highly unlikely. I am saying that it is interesting that Bin Laden now seems to feel the need to appeal to this language. In a way, it may be one of the few victories American neo-Wilsonianism has won, to push Bin Laden to use this kind of language. I doubt it amounts to much.
So...Osama Bin Laden is on the loose and has access to a video camera. And he's in good health. How does this help Bush?
There are few people out there that I hate more than Bill O'Reilly. From Salon:
"I honestly couldn't stop laughing when I saw the news (thanks to Matt Drudge) that Bill O'Reilly, one of Fox TV's biggest conservative stars, was being accused of making lurid phone sex calls to his woman producer. It was just too hilarious to believe. O'Reilly is such a blowhard. He's bizarrely arrogant and politically all over the map. I never watch him since he talks right over his guests -- he's a boorish host. That show is such a waste of time, unless you have low testosterone and want to get jacked up by a squinty-eyed dork pretending he's John Wayne.
I think that, in uncertain times, people like the sound of confidence, even when that confidence is mimed, which is the case with Bush as well as O'Reilly. Unlike Rush or Hannity, O'Reilly doesn't really have core values. And now we know why! Thanks to the wonders of the Web, we have learned that O'Reilly's fantasy life is a high-school orgy of loofah gloves and tropical palms. It's pitiful, in a way -- O'Reilly needs phone sex because he's trapped by his Catholic code. He's in psychosexual paralysis -- he doesn't have the confidence in his low-down desires that Clinton does!"
"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."
From that pillar of truth, Drudge:
BIN LADEN TRANSCRIPTI'd say the most interesting part is where he analyzes the Florida recount fiasco. Or maybe it's when he reminds us that wars cost money...
FRI OCT 29 2004 17:45:46 ET
Newsreader: A new message from Bin Laden to the American people about the reasons and resulats of the 9/11 attacks.
Newsreader 2: The head of AL Qaeda says the continuation of us policy will lead to the repetition of what happened.
Male presenter: The head of AL Qaeda organization directed a message to the American people and this video and audio apearence in this tape which Jezeera required for the first time for two years. In the beginning of his message, he spoke about the reasons why they chose the US to execute 9/11..
OBL: You American people, my speech to you is the best way to avoid another conflict about the war and its reasons and results. I am telling you security is an important pillar of human life. And free people don't let go of their security contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. He should tell us why we didn't hit Sweden for instance. Its known that those who hate freedom don't have dignified souls.like the 19 who were blessed. But we fought you because we are free people, we don't sleep on our oppression. We want to regain the freedom of our Muslim nation as you spill our security, we spill your security.
Female presenter: Bin Laden spoke for the first time about the main reasons he thought of executing Sept 11 attacks, confirming that the Israeli operation in Lebanon was the first incident where he thought of it.
OBL: I am so surprised by you. Although we are in the fourth year after the events of sept 11, Bush is still practicing distortion and misleading on you, and obscuring the main reasons and therefore the reasons are still existing to repeat what happened before. I will tell you the reasons behind theses incidents.
I will be honest with you on the moment when the decision was taken to understand. We never thought of hitting the towers. But after we were so fed up, and we saw the oppression of the American Israeli coalition on our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind and the incidents that really touched me directly goes back to 1982 and the following incidents. When the US permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon with the assistance of the 6th fleet. In these hard moments, it occurred to me so many meanings I cant explain but it resulted in a general feeling of rejecting oppression and gave me a hard determination to punish the oppressors. While I was looking at the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it came to my mind to punish the oppressor the same way and destroy towers in the US to get a taste of what they tasted, and quit killing our children and women.
Male presenter: Bin Laden considered in his message that the results of Sept 11 were successful in his opinion and as a reason of that, he said that the similarity between the administration of Bush the father and the arab regimes said Bush learned so much from them during his visits.
OBL: We didn't find difficulty dealing with Bush and his administration due to the similarity of his regime and the regims in our countries. Whish half of them are ruled by military and the other half by sons of kings and presidents and our experience with them is long. Both parties are arrogant and stubborn and the greediness and taking money without right and that similarity appeared during the visits of Bush to the region while people from our side were impressed by the US and hoped that these visits would influence our countries. Here he is being influenced by these regimes, Royal and military. And was feeling jealous they were staying for decades in power stealing the nations finances without anybody overseeing them. So he transferred the oppression of freedom and tyranny to his son and they call it th e Patriot Law to fight terrorism. He was bright in putting his sons as governors in states and he didn't forget to transfer his experience from the rulers of our region to Florida to falsify elections to benefit from it in critical times.
Female Presenter: Bin Laden considered the way Bush dealt with the first moments of Sept. 11, giving a good chance to the executors of Sept. 11 to complete it.
OBL: We agreed with Mohamed Atta, god bless him, to execute the whole operation in 20 minutes. Before Bush and his administration would pay attention and we never thought that the high commander of the US armies would leave 50 thousand of his citizens in both towers to face the horrors by themselves when they most needed him because it seemed to distract his attention from listening to the girl telling him about her goat butting was more important than paying attention to airplanes butting the towers which gave us three times the time to execute the operation thank god.
Male presenter: the final part of the message is that the security of the Americans depends on the policy that they execute despite the winner of the elections.
OBL: Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or Al Qaeda. Your security is in your hands. Each state that doenst mess with our security has automatically secured their security.
Female Presenter: In Bin Laden's message he approached other points. He pointed to the contradiction which considers oppression and killing of innocents a legal act. They formed an international law as bush the father did with the children of iraq according to bin laden. Bin Laden pointed to the millions of pounds of explosives dropped on Iraqi children as bush his son had done, as he said to remove an old agent and install a new agent to help instealing the oil of iraq. And bin laden said the events of 9/11 came as an answer to this oppression and said that if the answer to this oppression is considered bad terror, then we need to do it. And he stressed that he wants to deliver this message to the Americans in words and in deeds since the 9/11 events. He reminded Americans of a few warning messages through various news media like Time Magazine and CNN and other Arab and correspondents since 1996. He warned them of the conswquences of their countries policies. He talked abou t the damage Sept 11 caused the US economy and that it cost close to a trillion dollars. He talked about President Bush and that the emergency law requires more money.
END
Whoops! The GOP screwed up big time this week:
KING: Governor how about the report on KSTP though that the guy who was with them showed the weapons when he was with this American servicemen.And in this clip from the Today show, Rudy blames the troops:
RACICOT: You have servicemen on the ground, commanders on the ground, Larry, who said it wasn't there. Secondly you tell me...
KING: But we saw the film.
RACICOT: You tell me how possible is this?
SHARPTON: Are you saying, governor, the film is wrong?
Do you have any evidence to say there's something wrong with the film?
RACICOT: Just listen to me. Just listen to me for a minute. The bottom line is, when did you learn this fact? Today is the first time you learned this fact. Now, this has been up in TV advertisements since Monday.
And secondly, when they talk about removal, virtually everyone there on the ground has said, how do you move, without notice, 350 tons? It would have taken 70 or 80 dump trucks. The roads were literally occupied by American forces with traffic moving in one direction. So, what I'm telling is, these are unsubstantiated facts and yet John Kerry snaps it up and uses it in his campaign.
SHARPTON: But Governor are you denying -- are you denying the tape there. I mean, I think you've got to deal with the tape. I mean, you've had commanders that said that the...
RACICOT: There are photographs. There are photographs.
SHARPTON: You said the prison scandal didn't happen, and it only got worse.
Why would the American people...
RACICOT: There are satellite photographs -- there are satellite photographs showing movement around those. That was reported yesterday. Satellite photographs showing movement before American troops ever got there.
KING: Let me get a break guys. Then Governor Richards and Dennis Prager will respond. You're watching LARRY KING LIVE. We'll be right back.
"The president was cautious the president was prudent the president did what a commander in chief should do. No matter how you try to blame it on the president the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?"As Jon Stewart put it last night, we've some how moved from attacking the planning and praising the troops to praising the planning and attacking the troops.
"Kerry, by so rapidly embracing the [missing explosives] story, is going to end up being tarnished by it. What would he do as president? Get up every morning and say, 'I'm going to govern based on what I find in the newspapers?'"
...are irrelevant. From TNR:
KERRY'S HIDDEN STRENGTH?: A Democratic operative e-mails in response to yesterday's post about New Jersey:
"Bush is doing relatively, if modestly, better than to be expected out side of the battlegrounds--even in hardcore Democratic states--because they've been heavily buying national cable since March. And even on cable they've accumulated some real message over all those months.
Kerry has done relatively little, though the DNC has done some over the past months. In a place like Hawaii, locals have seen hundreds and hundreds of Bush spots, almost none on the other side. It's not likely, in the end, to matter in terms of electoral votes, but a central tenet of Rove-ism has always been to affect national numbers and create the sense of inevitability."
It's a fair point. Moreover, if he's right, then Bush is in real trouble. That is, if Rove's whole strategy was to artificially inflate Bush's lead nationally and then use the momentum from national polls to fuel a Bush sweep of the battleground states, then the fact that Bush is essentially tied in those inflated polls is horrible news for him. Among other things, this would explain why Kerry does so much better in polls that focus only on battleground states than he does in national polls: In some sense, Kerry's doing that well everywhere; it's just that Bush has obscured it in non-battleground states by running up a lot of garbage points. This also suggests the national polls could be masking a Kerry electoral-vote landslide.
Please go to Votepair.com and trade your vote for a Nader vote in a swing state. Lie about your information and register with as many email addresses as you own. Don't actually vote for Nader, but confuse the "idealistic liberals" from swing states into voting for Kerry.
We have conflicting reports out there regarding the mood of Bush's base. Some say that Republicans are depressed about their candidate. Others argue that the Republican base is full of true believers who think God chose THEIR president. So which one is it?
From Electablog:
Ivy League Insurgents
Why would a president who went to Harvard and Yale and grew up the son of the world's most powerful person try to position himself as opposed to the intellectual elite? He has to. At the core of the GOP strategy is a need to attract less-educated voters.
But how? First, you dumb down the president, play up his Texan accent and then pretend that every issue facing our government is simple.
Second, you attack the halls of academia and the mainstream media and anyone else who could use logic and reason against the blind faith on which you've built your house of cards.
According to a recent report from Democracy Corps, there is a huge education gap among voters.
"Today, there is now a 12-point education gap. Kerry is winning college educated voters by 10 points but losing the non-college graduates by 2 points. This emergence of the Education Gap is the new story of this election."
In order to win, the GOP must discredit thought leaders. You don't need a postgraduate degree to know that's a pretty sad strategy.
