Osama's new video? Who's agenda is he promoting for this election? As usual, he's promoting Osama

It's not always easy to seperate the bits and pieces of logic and reason from the blather when a sociopathic religious fanatic is talking (no, I'm talking about Osama ben Ladn right now, not George W Bush), but in this case, it seems almost everyone is missing the point. We're so wrapped up in ourselves, our response is "Does he want Kerry to win?" "Maybe he wants Bush to win."

What crap. This isn't about influencing our election. He doesn't care who wins.

We may think this election is the most important thing in the world, but the fact is, there's an entire world out there.

And this is about the fact that the entire world is watching our election and there isn't a PR man in the world who'd pass up an audience like that, so here comes Osama, like some dork in a joke-embroidered T-shirt standing up behind a mike-holding news person on the street and waving at the camera, "Hey, look at me! I'm important, too!"

Osama -- he's the guy at the NFL game with his face painted, pointing at the Jumbotron when he sees himself up there and then turning to the camera to shout "Hey! I'm on TV!"

Because he's only still news incidentally. He's past it.

He needs to remind every0ne, "Hey, I'm still here."

But he's so fucking irrelevant that if Bush didn't keep ringing that Fear Bell for his own benefit, we'd all be on another page.

Think about it:

We know that Bush didn't take out Wowie Zarqawi back before the war when they caught him in the crosshairs up there in Eastern Kurdistan where Saddam couldn't get to him because if we took him out, then the casus belli of "terrorists in Iraq" would be gone. That's been said, documented, established.

And if we'd caught Osama inTora Bora (as the Pentagon has finally verified, that he was there, and that we just stopped chasing him) well then we'd all have felt, at least to some extent, that the slaughter of all those people on those planes, in the World Trade Center and in the Pentagon had been avenged. And then what would he and his vile henchmen have to keep us from paying attention to the men behind the curtain?

Without Osama Ben Ladn, George W Bush is just a punk again.

Ben Ladn made one point in his video, one that anyone who actually paid attention to language knew all along. He said:

"We want to reclaim our nation."

The word "jihad" means "to drive out the invaders."

To make them go home and leave the locals alone.

Whether we should have been there in the first place or whether we should give up whatever benefits we've gotten from being there -- those things are irrelevant, and I'm not going to argue them.

This has been all about "Get the fuck out of my house."

Clear enough?

We heard it in Vietnamese.
The French heard it in Algerian Arabic.
Papa Doc heard it in French.
Batista and Somoza and Juan Peron and a whole slew of others all heard it in Spanish.

And Colin Powell has heard it loud and clear in Iraqi Arabic:

Secretary of State Colin Powell has privately confided to friends in recent weeks that the Iraqi insurgents are winning the war, according to Newsweek. The insurgents have succeeded in infiltrating Iraqi forces "from top to bottom," a senior Iraqi official tells Newsweek in tomorrow’s issue of the magazine, "from decision making to the lower levels."

But as to Osama? It ain't about him any more.