Heeeeeere’s Osama

I’ll let Josh Marshall’s comments on the fact that Bush’s invasion to Iraq (and indeed, his whole gestalt) have pretty much given OBL a new lease on life, serve as the appropriate comment on the “new” OBL tape that has emerged, in which OBL pontificates incoherently on everything from global warming to sub-prime lending and the “low tax” structure of Islam.
You’ve read before (perhaps even here) why it is most unlikely that OBL’s own group will strike us here in”Das Homeland” (as opposed to say, a copycat or knockoff AQ group)… that reason being, of course, that OBL’s principal demand, that the United States quit India the Holy Peninsula of Saudi Arabia, was met (or at least, announced and met a short time later) just a few days before the President declared “Mission Accomplished” on that aircraft carrier.
Insofar as OBL has seemingly learned that since he can get the same bang for his buck by issuing an inexpensive absolutely no-risk incoherent video or audio tape… why bother with a costly– and risky– attack? Again, there may well be AQ offshoots and affiliates that do this sort of thing… but OBL’s own group… well, who knows? Then again… OBL might well attack us tomorrow, or, say, next Tuesday (just to spoil Rudy’s party!) Someone such as I who works now (as he did on that other September morning) within a football field or two of the WTC site shouldn’t be too flip about the threat OBL presents… and I’m not. Nor am I flip about the infinitely greater threat to my life and liberty that George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney present to my life and liberty, in deliberately overreacting to anything OBL does and (magically) usurping hitherto undreamed of power for themselves. As I often say… that’s just me.
You really do have to hand it to Bush, though (and his old family friend OBL, with whom he has a perverse symbiotic relationship): not even the mid-term Congressional elections were worth trotting out OBL himself (then again, one is hard-pressed to see what possible difference “Democratic leadership” under Pelosi and Reid has made… honestly beyond a rather pathetic minimum wage increase, I got nothin’). And yet, now, it seems, for the big sixth anniversary celebration, and for the Fred Thompson campaign kick-off, and of course, ahead of General Petraeus’s “report” that Karl Rove wrote… for this OBL himself reemerges.
All I can say is that someone must be making an awful lot of money on keeping the Iraq war going. An awful lot.