The American Spectator

Loose Canons

Osama bin Laden's latest videotaped message, which aired on Friday, is only the latest oddity of this bizarre political year. If you're confused by the similarities among MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, and bin Laden, it's not because any of these players is taking the trouble to distinguish his television commercials from the others'. OBL is still a dangerous adversary, but unless his message contained coded signals to operatives here to mount an attack, it's hard to see how it will affect Tuesday's election. The Big Lie Kampaign by the Kerry Kampers is a much greater concern.

OBL said, "I am surprised by you. Although we are in the fourth year after the events of September 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…Your security is in your hands. Each state that doesn't mess with our security has automatically secured their security." If you translate that into less tortured English, OBL is saying that if we act like Spain and throw out a government that actually wants to kill him and his ilk, he'll lay off attacking us. If we give him Lebensraum, he'll give us peace in our time. Only Chamberlain, Zapatero, Kerry or Clouseau could fall for a ploy such as that. Naturally, the wacko libs can't help but try to spin it against the president.

Walter Cronkite, once the most trusted man in America, joined the ranks of the Michael Moorons, by proclaiming on Saturday that he was "inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House…he probably set up bin Laden to this thing." Please, Uncle Walter, take your medicine and lie down. Karl Rove is not Sauron, and OBL -- whether you like it or not -- apparently cribbed his speech from Michael Moore's movie and DNC talking points. Bin Laden's as much a plagiarist as Laurence Tribe or Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Rudy Giuliani said it all on Meet the Press yesterday. America's Mayor said that the new videotape from Osama bin Laden sounded almost exactly like Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. London's Daily Telegraph noted dryly that bin Laden stopped short of endorsing John Kerry for president. But there's no denying that bin Laden's message was a warning to America to reject President Bush's bid for re-election.

Because bin Laden misunderstands America and its politics he took no care to distinguish his message from John Kerry's. OBL might have been reading from DNC talking points when he made his videotape.

In early August, Kerry said, "Had I been reading to children and had my top aide whispered in my ear, 'America is under attack,' I would have told those kids very politely and nicely that the president of the United States had something that he needed to attend to, and I would have attended to it." OBL said that because the President didn't react quickly enough on 9/11, it gave the terrorists enough time to execute the attack.

Bin Laden accuses George H.W. Bush of putting Jeb Bush into the governorship of Florida "to falsify elections." He calls the Patriot Act "oppression and tyranny." All that's missing from OBL is a complaint that W blew it in Tora Bora by not capturing or killing him or some taunt about the so-called "missing" tons of explosives in Iraq. We cannot discount al Qaeda's ability to attack us, perhaps even today or tomorrow. But the OBL tape will probably not have any effect on the election. What is having an effect is the flood of lies we and the media are awash in courtesy the Kerry Kampers. They must believe they can bamboozle their way into the White House and, with a complicit media, they just might. It's time to fire back.

HERE'S A FULL MAG of armor-piercing facts to shove into your rhetorical M-16 and gun down those lies. Flick off the safety, put the selector on "rock and roll," and fire away:

• There will be no military draft under George W. Bush. He's said so, Mr. Rumsfeld has said so, and all that's lacking is a note from Dubya's mom. The volunteer force is working, and its quality would be degraded by injecting draftees. Moreover, any further military operations -- such as against Iran or Syria -- will not be on the model of the one in Iraq. Saying we're paralyzed by Iraq and have to draft for a larger army is just flat wrong.

• We didn't "outsource" the assault on Tora Bora to Afghan warlords, blow the op or let OBL get away. We had large groups of Spec Ops troops operating with Afghans in places no westerners could go alone, and they managed to capture or kill most of the al Qaeda fighters they found there. We could have put the entire U.S. Army into those hills, and still been unable to have bin Laden surrounded as Kerry said we did. Ask the Russians. They tried it and took tens of thousands of casualties in the Afghan mountains before withdrawing in defeat. Did OBL get away? Maybe. No one knew then, or knows now, whether OBL was there or not.

• The "missing" 380 tons of explosives supposedly in the fortuitously named "Al Qaqaa" depot in Iraq may or may not have been there. If they were, they were seized and disposed of by Army demolitions experts, as Maj. Army Maj. Austin Pearson explained in a Friday press conference. His former unit, the 24th Ordnance Company of the 24th Corps Support Group, entered the Al Qaqaa facility and on about April 13, 2003, less than a month after the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the company removed about 250 tons of "TNT, plastic explosives, …detonation cords, initiators and white-phosphorus rounds." U.S. forces have seized over 400,000 tons of munitions and weapons in Iraq. There is no significance -- zero, zip, zilch -- to the "missing" 380 tons of explosives.

• There is no plan to ask for another $70 billion in funding for Iraq. Pentagon sources told me last week that the number is entirely fictional. They haven't even asked the services yet for any estimates or numbers on which such a request would be based.

• There is no Bush plan to privatize Social Security. Mr. Bush wants to allow younger people to select private savings accounts that can save and invest for themselves to get a higher return. All the Baby Boomers and older folks will be covered under the old plan, without any diminution of benefits.

• Kerry and Edwards, despite all their words, don't give a damn about the American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen who go in harm's way. If they do, why haven't they gone to Iraq to spend even a minute with the guys? Of the list of dozens of senators who have visited the troops, the names of John Kerry and Edwards don't appear.

• Before his 1971 Senate testimony in which he said war crimes were a commonplace in Vietnam, Kerry visited Paris and met with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong representatives. He has never explained what they talked about, whether any plans were made or agreements reached. And the mainstream media has never even asked him to explain.

'Nuff said. Spread these facts around to everyone you know, and get out the vote. As Sean Hannity has been saying every day, if you don't want to wake up on November 3 to newscasters talking about "President-elect Kerry," you'd better get to the polls.

My prediction? Bush by about 49-47, with Dem challenges holding up the results 'til mid-January. Hold on to your hats and vote, damnit. Anyone not on his deathbed tomorrow has no excuse for failing to vote. (Don't think you'll get even a day off after Election Day. It's Rudy and Zell for '08.)

TAS Contributing Editor Jed Babbin is the author of Inside the Asylum: Why the U.N. and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think (Regnery Publishing).

topics:
Mainstream Media, Television, Social Security, Military, Iraq, Iran, Russia, NATO