Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Bin Laden sought Bush victory

Nov. 7, 2004. 01:00 AM

Remember him, the guy in the picture on the right?

He has barely been mentioned since Tuesday when the U.S. media began framing the election results around "morality" — a genteel way of saying middle America hates homos — instead of the fear factor that drove most of the campaign.

Behold Osama bin Laden, star of the most effective ad all year for the Bush-Cheney ticket. It debuted two Fridays ago, on the eve of the vote, in time to mute talk of the missing explosives at Al Qaaqa and to wipe out coverage of the impending collapse of the necessary overhaul of American intelligence agencies. Its appearance could not have been better managed if George W's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, had planned it.

As Vanity Fair's James Wolcott lamented on his blog ( http://jameswolcott.com ) on the day after the election, "This was the outcome (bin Laden) wanted, a gift from us to him: an unapologetic Christian Crusader in the White House whose re-election gives lie to the notion that Abu Ghraib was an aberration and that the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians weigh upon America's conscience. This morning America could not look more like a grinning aggressor to the Arab world, an aggressor with fresh marching orders."

Or, if you prefer the picture worth a thousand words version, check one of my favourite Canadian sites at http://myblahg.blogspot.com [F6 note -- quite good]. There, blogger Robert McClelland has a Photoshopped screen grab of bin Laden superimposed on the flight deck of USS Abraham Lincoln with that infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner behind him.

But of course.

Everything about that video indicated that the terrorist mastermind has also mastered the media. They lined up to broadcast his message as eagerly as any freeloading second-string critic generates blurbs for third-rate Hollywood movies.

Leaving aside the obvious — the not-in-a-cave sound and lighting, the fact that he was using a lectern instead of a boulder, not to mention that he is very much alive — Bin Laden used mental terrorism to ensure that Americans would vote to bring back the poster child for his jihadist recruiting drive. What's more, he showed us that, wherever he is, he is plugged in.

For example, in the complete translated transcript — which was available Monday, although it was not widely published in the States — Bush is repeatedly denigrated. He is called a liar "engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes" of 9/11, accused of having "shady" connections to oil concerns, and mocked as a failed commander-in-chief who ignored the warnings of impending attack and who listened to a children's story when he should have acted.

Bin Laden knew that making fun of Bush would goad the electorate into supporting him — especially in a climate where it's a virtue to be hated by the Europeans, the United Nations and others who are not American.

Alan Rutkowski of Edmonton, in a letter to the Globe and Mail published last Monday, said it best: "Clearly Osama bin Laden wants Americans to think that he thinks they will think he only wants them to think he is trying to get George Bush re-elected so they will think that by voting for Mr. Bush they will not have been taken in, but in reality, if they think that, they will have been."

Bin Laden follows the U.S. media closely enough to know that the Bushite spin machine would use his video against Democratic contender John Kerry. So it did, right on cue. Instead of focussing on how he was still not caught "dead or alive" and how Iraq was a deadly diversion from stopping Al Qaeda, many news outlets painted filmmaker Michael Moore as the bad guy. That's because it was clear that Bin Laden was aware that the pet goat scene from Fahrenheit 9/11 had resonance.

"I'm glad to know that Michael Moore is giving aid and comfort to the enemy," snapped Danielle Pletka of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute on CNN.

Then she went on, as did many of her ilk last weekend, to accuse Kerry of exploiting the video for his political gain — as if he hadn't long been emphasizing that Bin Laden was still out there threatening Americans.

"This shifts the topic from Iraq where the challenger was hitting the president hard for alleged mismanagement of the war," opined MSNBC's Chris Matthews, as if he had nothing to do with shifting the topic. "This creates a terrible situation for the challenger because it seems to me that Karl Rove has his finger on this. He knows that the American people have only one president at a time. And that's George W. Bush. We only have one protector at a time. We have to rally behind the president when we're threatened by an enemy. Osama bin Laden. And he's done it again."

Bin Laden's strategy is clear. It's all in the tape: Bankrupt the U.S. as it fights the "war on terror" — and strike the states that helped return Bush to power.

Why the media are not exploring all that is a mystery.

Maybe they wanted Bush to win. Or maybe they don't want to lose the Florida tourism ads lined up for Christmas.

Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&a...