Osama's "gift"

The very idea that having Osama bin Laden pop up on a video four days before the election could be a good thing for President Bush is just Bizarre! But here you have Bush campaign officials calling it "a gift."
It would seem to me that having verification that Osama is still alive and doing well 3 1/2 years after 9-11 would be a reminder of Bush's utter failure to bring him to justice.

Some people are speculating that Osama is trying to influence the election with his sudden reappearance. They say that the video will scare people into voting for Bush and will also take attention away from Bush's major screwup with the missing explosives at Al-Qaqaa. I doubt that it will have a significant impact, but I don't doubt that Osama is hoping it will give Bush a boost. Why wouldn't he want the guy who can't catch him to be elected?

Imagine an evil version of the Roadrunner urging people to vote for Wile E. Coyote to continue being his chief nemesis.
There goes Wile E. Bush with his Acme WMD detector that leads him in the wrong direction and blows up in his face. Meanwhile Osama Roadrunner races off in the opposite direction. Beep! Beep!

No, we have to be smart if we are going to catch Osama. You don't do it by launching a poorly planned war against a country that had nothing to do with 9-11 and no al-Qaeda connections (at least before we turned the whole country into a giant al-Qaeda recruiting center).
Bush has led us down the wrong path and that is the main reason of many why he should not be elected president. If nothing else, Bush should have made capturing Osama his No. 1 priority after 9-11. He could have screwed everything else up - wrecked the economy, run up huge deficits, lost 2 million jobs, turned our allies against us, etc. - but as long as people thought he was hot on Osama's trail they would have stayed behind him and he would be winning this election hands down. But he dropped the ball in Afghanistan and then decided to play a different game altogether.

I had gotten to the point like many other people where I imagined and hoped that Osama had crawled into a cave somewhere and died. But unfortunately the new tape shows that not only is he still with us but he seems to be in pretty good shame. He doesn't look like someone who has been living in a cave all this time trying to avoid detection.
Perhaps that is because all of our military and intelligence resources have been redirected and stretched to the breaking point during this long snipe hunt in Iraq.

I suppose the rightwing reaction to this news is predictable, but I can't get over how bizarre it is. Imagine for a moment if Al Gore was president right now and the Osama tape pops up right before the election. The rightwingers would have been pulling their hair out by the fistful and shrieking at the top of their lungs about how Gore had failed to keep the country safe and needs to be removed from office immediately. Is there any doubt that would have been the reaction?