"You hadn't heard? Well, I'm not breaking news, President Bush knows damn well that UBL has been dead for quite some time. But why would Bush keep it to himself? If he were to disclose his knowledge that UBL is dead he would blow John Kerry's doors off in the election, and yet he remains silent. Why?
Maybe you're wondering how I know he's dead. Perhaps one of my SEAL buddies let me in on the secret? NO. I know because a publicity whore and grandstanding scumbag like UBL could not possibly resist the multitude of opportunites to inspire his cult members. His number 1, Zwahiri, has appeared on video or audio broadcasts every few months since 9/11. UBL has not been heard from since Tora Bora despite developments in the GWOT in Afghanistan and Iraq that make it unthinkable for him to have remained silent. Not to mention successful attacks in Bali, Madrid, Turkey, and Jakarta to name a few that remain unremarked upon by UBL. The invasion and occupation of an Islamic state by the US and not a word. Elections held for the first time in Afghan history, and he had nothing to say about it in the lead up. AQ tried once early on to air a tape that never mentioned key developments in the Afghan campaign and was quickly discredited as an attempt to put one over on his followers by airing a previous recording. Zwahiri decided that it was better to just pretend that UBL was alive because there was no plausible martyr story to tell. UBL went out running for his life like a coward. He is dead. His remains are turds shat by scavenging animals in the mountains of Afghanistan blown by the wind and stomped on by US troops.
By why not make it public? After all, this is the one thing that could ensure the President's re-election. Have you noticed how coy DOD officials and high ranking officers are when the question is posed? They know. They certainly have intelligence to this effect. Of course, the President could have instructed subordinates to start saying that intel indicates UBL is dead. This would have put pressure on him to prove otherwise by issuing a statement which he is clearly unable to make. This process could have started 6 months ago, and if UBL did not answer, it would in effect prove the case. But it didn't happen. Why not?
Because the President knows that making UBL a martyr would serve to further inspire his minions, and he realizes that preventing this from happening is more important than his re-election. Instead, UBL remains forever silent even as his recruits yearn to hear his voice. Eventually these cultists will realize themselves that UBL went out like a punk, not a martyr and that the AQ head shed has been lying to them for years. That realization combined with US combat boots knocking their teeth down their throats will go a long way to beating this cult into submission. But it is important to recognize that the President's committment to killing terrorists supercedes his committment to his own re-election. I'm sure he hopes that the American people will come to this conclusion on their own and vote for him anyway, but it is quite a risk to take in the ultimate ME situation.
This kind of integrity and committment stands in stark contrast to his opponent. Kerry has proved to be a Blue Falcon, a traitor, a louse, a shameless opportunist, and an lazy bureaucrat that pads his resume. Kerry is a smart guy too, and he realizes what is going on. But it hasn't stopped him from trying to bait the President into abandoning a critical propaganda victory in the GWOT by incessantly peddling his Tora Bora "outsourcing" charge in all three debates. He knows that the President will not respond to this charge so he is free to make it. Just like the Cheney lesbian scheme, this is a coordinated hatchet job, but this is on an issue that Kerry knows the President must choose to either defend the SOF troops that got the job done or remain silent. To his personal credit he never took the bait, but to his professional detriment he must let an unanswered charge linger. Do you have that kind of discipline? Especially in crunchtime? I don't know if I do, and I'll be happy to never have to find out.
President Bush, meanwhile, has just continued to keep the pressure on the terrorists, get us out of a recession, protect the homeland, and generally put the country's interests ahead of his own. He deserves your vote.
UPDATE 10/17/04 0847: Investigative aids / Fake Tapes
The Science Behind Common Sense
Deconstructionists in particular, among the academy, heaped scorn upon the notion of common sense, considering it to be simply another means that powerful people employ to keep themselves in power. Of course, they considered everything to be a means of powerful people keeping themselves in power, except of course their own doctrine, a rhetorical bludgeon which they employed as a powerful means of assuming and then keeping themselves in power.
There is much folk wisdom that is quite wrong, to be sure, but it is important to remember where much of it comes from: several-thousand years of trial and error by humans very much like ourselves, in genetic terms at the very least.
Millions of people, after all, have encountered the same problems most of us tend to run into, or ones very like them (carriage accidents, for example, analogous to our automobile mishaps), and tried all sorts of ways of dealing with them. Some worked, some didn't, some were partially successful, and some created further disasters. These people told one another about these incidents and their results, and often other people witnessed them, and thus a huge amount of data came into being and was plugged into civilization's vast store of memories.
With such a large amount of innormation being accumulated by so many people, there is a good chance that many truths will be found. Naturally, some of these will be difficult to prove in strictly logical terms, because so much innormation and reasoning is necessary to the normation of an explicit logical argument for each of them. We know these truths through experience and intuition, as our brains work faster than even the brightest among us can explicitly reason. Thus these are perfectly legitimate ways of obtaining knowledge.
Hence, before discarding any proposition that involves no clear contradictions of known facts or internal logic, it is important that we first try to find some explanation of why the principle is believed to be true. Of course, we should always be willing to test all things, and must be quick to discard those that prove untrue. That is only common sense.
But we should always have respect for propositions that prove true even though we aren't quite sure why.
Which brings us to a fascinating article in the New York Times on the matter of colic in infants. Colic is the prolonged, unexplained crying that some babies habitually do during the early months of their lives. Scientists, the article notes, are in great disagreement over the causes of colic, and equally discordant over what parents should best do about it.
What is particularly interesting about this as regards common sense is the solution suggested by a doctor who has studied the problem and come up with a five-step treatment that seems to do wonders in quelling infants' crying jags. It is an excellent case of human experience over the ages being codified into common-sense truths that are nonetheless true despite being difficult to prove in logical, scientific terms. Here's how the Times article describes it:
"Dr. Karp's solution: recreate for infants sensations in the womb to help them stay calm.
"In the womb, the soon-to-be-born infant is packed tightly, head down in fetal position, with lots of jiggling and a whooshing sound -- blood flowing through the placenta -- that is louder than a vacuum cleaner. According to Dr. Karp, these conditions put the fetus into a trance.
"'Fussy babies would really benefit if they could hop back inside the uterus whenever they get overwhelmed,' Dr. Karp said. Paradoxically, their distress can also stem from being understimulated. 'Our culture believes in the strange myth that a baby wants to be left in a quiet dark room,' he said. 'But what is this stillness for a newborn baby? It might be aversive, since the womb is jiggly and noisy.'
"To calm a baby, Dr. Karp sets out five maneuvers that he says will touch off a calming reflex and put the infant to sleep. They must be carried out progressively, as a kind of dance, to work their magic, he said."
These include swaddling, holding the infant in one's arms with the baby on its side or stomach, making "a very loud shushing noise delivered directly into the baby's ear," jiggling the baby, and allowing the child to suck on a finger or other nonnutritive source, according to the Times article.
And these are, of course, exactly the things that parents from time immemorial have used in quieting babies.
Common sense."