Osama bin Laden will never be captured and never be killed. His role is to play boogyman. As long as he is out there somewhere, the GOP can raise his specter in order to make us fear another attack. It might be forty years from now, but they'll still try to control us by making us fear a seven-foot tall Arab who disappears like a ghost and can call in devastating suicide attacks on any city in the world on a moment's notice.
Flipping that around, bin Laden's role for al-Queda is identical, but from the other side. As long as he's alive somewhere, plotting to bring down the Great Satan (that's us), he's a powerful symbol for radical Islam.
Now all that said, the Bush Administration played the card too many times. Every time the GOP got in trouble, they used 9/11 and/or bin Laden to distract us. Now Americans are almost immune. Bin Laden has only one more role to play for the GOP: if things get really really bad, they can find him, capture him, and have a big show trial that will be floated as justification for everything that's happened since 9/11. Luckily for us, I think that time has passed. I figured Bush would play that card in late October of 2004. Now that the GOP are seen as the party of arrogant, incompetent, corrupt, greedy, racist, war-mongering child molesters, even bringing in bin Laden won't put a Republican in the White House in 2008.
Bin Laden,assuming he's still alive, will die in some secret location. It may be a cave in the mountains of Pakistan, it may be in one of his family's homes in Saudi Arabia, it may be at the home of a friend of the family he trusts not to betray him, but we will never find out.
-=Logan
Spockmate!
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Re: My Picks
Thu Jan 11, 2007 at 09:58:06 AM EST
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Your view of government power is a bit overbroad in my mind Logan. If the current administration/the GOP had an inherent ability to capture bin laden they would have done so -- thus burnishing their foreign policy/national security credentials for the next decade or so.
The fact that they have not done so, even while the administration and the Republican Party's name became synonymous with foreign policy incompetence and strategic failure tells me that no such ability exists.
The republican party should be a joke to the next generation -- the guys who metaphorically (and literally in the case of the VP) couldn't shoot straight.
This administration is incompetent but thats ok, because Americans don't mind incompetence. The idea that Americans are being "fooled" and just now are "catching on" is just pablum that left-wing activist write in order to ignore the results of the 2004 presidential election.
Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.
