Calling a spade a diamond

One of the amazing things about the election result this week was that Osama Bin Laden looks like he's been at Club Med for the past year, and many believe that this actually helped Bush. I think the reasoning is that with an enemy that slick, only a straight-shooter like Bush could ever hope to catch him. On that thought, the Concrete Dildo this week goes to Arnaud de Borchgrave from Newsmax, for trying to explain how our inability to catch Bin Laden should naturally be blamed on someone with a darker complexion than Bush.

With his latest video sally, Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted terrorist, has repositioned himself as the only leader willing to confront the world's sole superpower.

That was a repositioning? What was he doing before when he attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

Standing at a desk in a white turban and gold-colored ceremonial cloak, his message was clear: Not on the run but sharing the limelight with President Bush and his challenger John Kerry and hard at work as leader of disenfranchised Arabs and other Muslims seeking Palestine's liberation...

Stop right there, I'm a little confused. When we went into Iraq and took a hands-on approach to running the main industries and setting up a friendly government and police force and bombing the cities that don't go along with us, that was Iraq's liberation, right? But when Israel does the exact same thing in the West Bank, the Palestinians still need to be liberated after that?

OK, continue.

...and the downfall of the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East and absolute monarchies and emirates of the Gulf.

Hey, that's our goal too!! Cool, maybe Bin Laden and Bush should meet up and figure out how to do that together!

Yasser Arafat's passing from the world stage also leaves a revolutionary vacancy. Thus, bin Laden's latest peroration is designed to outflank Muslim moderates who failed to obtain a change in Washington's pro-Israeli, benign neglect of the Palestinian crisis for the duration of the Iraqi crisis.

Stupid Muslim moderates, thinking they could change Washington's policy through dialogue. Even a fool knows that the only way to get Washington to pay attention to you is through terrorism.

Bin Laden now knows that certain countless millions of Muslims, surveyed by the Pew Foundation two years in a row, trust him more than George W. Bush. In Muslim countries with a combined population of 450 million, bin Laden was a clear winner as a "freedom fighter" over the U.S. president. In Morocco and Jordan, two traditionally pro-Western countries, at least at the regime-to-regime level, Mr. Bush was trusted by fewer than 10 percent in either country.

I won't bore anyone with the lurid details in the remainder of the article about how Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani government are to be blamed for Bin Laden's health and Bush's unpopularity in the Muslim world, but I find it amazing this week how difficult it seems to just blame people who most deserve the blame for things. The reason that Bin Laden is so popular is because we've made his message popular, not because the Pakistanis either can't or won't find him. Bin Laden's popularity is Bush's failure, and trying to blame someone else is only going to make him even more popular. Arnaud, congratulations for contributing to Americans' gross misunderstanding of world politics. When all of this causes even more damage in the Middle East, I'm sure you'll find someone else to blame it on then too.


What's the French word for jackass?