Osama the Uninformed

As we all know now due to the recent video, Osama Bin Laden isn't dead. Well, according to the following, he just may be braindead:

The tape of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera(1) on Friday, October 29th included a specific threat to "each U.S. state," designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming election against George W. Bush. The U.S. media in general mistranslated the words "ay wilaya" (which means "each U.S. state")(2) to mean a "country" or "nation" other than the U.S., while in fact the threat was directed specifically at each individual U.S. state....The Islamist website Al-Qal'a explained what this sentence meant: "This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, 'Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice,' it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy."

We're not like Spain, these type of threats only backfire here. If this translation error were not present then we'd probably be looking at a Bush landslide tommorow due to our love of giving the rest of the world The Finger: think about it, if this were made public, how many people would be going to the polls thinking "F%#@ Osama, I'll show him..."? If he really wanted Bush to lose then he would've practically endorsed Bush himself -- you zig, we zag.

Besides that logical error, he somehow reads into Kerry a capitulation to his demands when he's made no such indication. John Kerry may be more skeptical of the war in Iraq, but last I heard that wasn't the sole complaint that him & his cohorts have had. Or are we to think that he's back-burnered everything else, including our support of Israel, to do what amounts to betting it all on red in regards to Iraq?

Also, he completely ignores how foreign policy is determined under our system of government. There is no state-level control over what we do abroad, so even if his threat were to pan out it'd have no effect. Sure, it'd cause the garden-variety panic if there were suicide bombings in every state that voted for Bush, but if he won re-election then even if the Democrats pulled off a miracle & took control of congress he'd have a green light for pretty much whatever he felt like doing in response. And the reverse scenario? Kerry's response would most likely be just as hard, if not harder to dispell the image made of him during the campaign. Really, the only way that this type of attack wouldn't be met with increasing force would be if Noam Chomsky were president.

For someone who considers themself knowledgeable enough on US politics & culture to arrogantly criticize it it, he doesn't appear to have done his homework....

(linked at Outside The Beltway)