(Sorry to Tony Pierce's readers, we covered these same points recently.)

> Puts kind of a different face on that gloater
> in the White House sending the kids mostly of
> poor or struggling families off to fight
> against the wrong enemy...

'Nam was a shitbath, and everybody knew it. The country had lost the will to send its strongest children to kill and to die. So various mechanisms were used to protect them.

Al Gore did what well-connected kids were supposed to do to survive. Bill Clinton did what intellectual kids were supposed to do. George Bush did what rich kids were supposed to do.

None of this was secret until Mr. Barnes spoke out, Amy. After a decade or two of reflection, people figured out that no matter what position you took on 'Nam, horrible things happened to people.

The speed by which popular opinion ceased to be 'judgmental' about this was stunning. In summer 1992 I was working a union gig at ABC, where our foreman was a hard-assed ex-marine 'Nam vet. I asked what he thought of Clinton's shenanigans to avoid service, and he said he didn't care. "Times change, people don't care about the stuff they used to care about."

He was right. Clinton kicked ass that November, and for the first three election cycles with boomers in contention, 'Nam service was not a burning issue in judging candidates.

Kerry's now trying to revive it, but only because he thinks Bush is vulnerable. And Kerry seems annoyed that people are actually trying to review his own war record, although in "reporting for duty" he's given them nothing else to work with!

(See also: http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/004873.html )

Now, While showering off a teary hangover on the morning of 9/12/01, it seemed to me that a new approach was necessary for dealing with "fundamentalist Barbarians"... Our coddling of their internal tensions, and our support of murderous dictators to oppress them, was not working out. "Inflaming" them was no longer a concern.

Bush agreed with me, in contradiction to his entrenched family traditions. So despite a previous wartime experience some eagerly portray as unusually cowardly, he led the nation into wars liberating tens of millions from theocratic terror and punishing corruption. And in both cases, these nations had come to come to their hardships through the abject tomfoolery of the United States, and we had a moral obligation to clean them out anyway. I think Bush, the alcoholic, dyslexic ne'er-do-well, has grown since he was a young man.

Kerry's example, even when you blindly credit his 'Nam years, works the other way. He's done nothing since that he's eager to tell us about, even while living an endlessly public life.

Osama Bin Laden died under a daisy cutter in the mountains of Afghanistan on Halloween night, 2001. Bush doesn't talk about OBL for the same reason he doesn't talk about Elvis Presley: He's dead.

Crid, you keep saying that about the daisy cutter, and I'd really like to know your source on that, since audio of Osama has surfaced many times since which references the Iraq war. If there's solid evidence, why wouldn't the CIA or anyone else have proclaimed it? Doing so would certainly help Bush, and the war on terror in general.
I'd like to believe it, but you're the only person I've ever heard it from.

It seems to me the only big winner in this whole situation is The Saudi family.

1.) They got our military bases out of their country without firing a shot, thus appeasing the more radical elements of their society. In the process, they kept 100% of their security by having US forces move next door. In the event of political upheaval, we will be there for them without a doubt.

2.) They made untold billions of petrol-dollars without any sacrifice. The oil coming from Iraq before the war was miniscule due to the UN sanctions, and most of the gravy coming from higher oil prices is psychological. The fear and uncertainty factor adds from $5.00 to $15.00 per barrel these days, all pure profit.

3.) Their most likely external threat (Saddam Hussein) was nuetralized without a single Saudi national killed in the process. Plus, they were able to go on record as being against all their good fortune for moral and religious reasons. What a hat trick!

And regarding Osama, the more suspicious angels of my nature tell me his existence or lack thereof is a political ace in the hole to be played sometime in the future. It would be nice to know he was vaporized on my favorite holiday though.

> ...you keep saying that...

LYT, I made it up!

2 big themes-

1st theme: It's not reasonable to believe OBL lives. As the presumptive figurehead to a quasi-religious movement of anti-American feeling with almost global reach, it's not possible that he would simply cede the 'honor' and go live quietly on a sandy beach with his millions. His is the sort of office that doesn't exist unless someone's at the desk.

We blew the shit out of those mountainsides without too much concern for whether he was in them or not. He was fucked up with kidney disease, and $250 million won't help you run from B-1's when you're hauling dialysis equipment through martian desert canyons. His power structure and financial apparatus throughout the world has been essentially disassembled; within his adopted Afghanistan, it has been vaporized.

He's the most wanted man on Earth. I could raise a hundred grand for his capture from impoverished friends on my cell phone with half an hour's notice. But more people have seen Elvis in that one Mississippi 7-11 than have seen OBL anywhere.

IIRC, some of the recordings have been dated to earlier than 9/11. All of them are low-fi. All include broad stretches of boilerplate rhetoric. Current events, when described at all, are often delivered by lieutenants in surrounding messages. Contrast this with another popular, medically-challenged audio conservative, Rush Limbaugh. We know Rush is still alive because HIS radio chats talk about current events in detail.

Also, Limbaugh shows up at golf tournaments. What OBL hasn't done is publish a picture of himself holding the NY Times or (more likely) Paris-Match from this weekend, or even two years ago. And doing so would invigorate his multitudes tremendously.

2nd theme: It doesn't matter if he's alive or not.

Yes, individual men make history and all. But 9/11 and the anti-western feelings that celebrated it were not the product of one twisted mind. If he's alive we'll get him, and if not there's still much to do.

I worry when people snicker and say, 'If Bush is so great, where's Osama?' This is not an episode of Miami Vice where the bad stuff stops when we take down a Quinn Martin character actor. If the authenticity of the tapes was "solid," something would have been done about it.

Who knows how an October 2004 capture of OBL would play out in hearts of voters? History will not deliver us a toe-tagged corpse. Oh well.

Perhaps Bush and the federal intel apparatus are cynically exploiting this human desire to fault specific personalities. Maybe they're ass-covering, or working some other angle. Maybe they just sincerely think that it's his voice on new tape.

It ain't!

Eric, I think the Saudis liked having Saddam as a bad boy neighbor, because it made their own inequities seem less grievous. They'd probably like to have things put back to a 1998 sort of chessboard.