Thursday, July 29, 2004
(11:22 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Conspiracy Theorists of the World, Unite!
So about this thing where the Bush administration is ordering Pakistan to hurry up and capture people before the election. (Via Fontana Labs, among others.) I mean, sure, it's a "great coincidence" that ... um, what's his name again? ... oh yeah, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was captured right before Kerry's speech. But guess what? I've been following this stuff pretty closely for a while now, and I've never heard of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani in my entire life. I'm sure some right-wing blogger out there is wondering at the decadence of the cultural left in blogging about Kerry's speech rather than about the capture of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani -- maybe if you read the name enough times in this post, you'll remember that his name is Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani -- but I just cycled through the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and even Fox News, and while the capture of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is high up on their "other news" column, the John Kerry Show is taking up almost the entirety of their prime real estate.So basically, if the Bush administration planned the capture of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, or the announcement thereof to coincide with Kerry's speech, they were morons to think it was a big distraction. And as for the theory that they're going to trot out bin Laden at the last minute to guarantee their victory -- doesn't that assume at least some degree of practical, real-world competence on their part (i.e., that they were able to catch him in the first place, or find people who could)? Don't you think that it would be as transparent to non-Republican hacks as Clinton's bombing of Iraq during the Lewinsky scandal was to non-Democratic hacks? Finally, don't you think that this whole thing with going to war in Iraq and never, ever mentioning bin Laden for three fucking years might kind of blunt the impact of trotting out bin Laden? (Are liberals other than Michael Moore even harping that much on the bin Laden thing, such that it would constitute even a mild "I told you so" if -- mind you, three years after the fact -- they finally did capture him?)
I love trying to parse out the exact degree to which Bush is evil as much as the next guy, but until I see it for myself, I'm going to have to chalk this one up to hysteria. The Bush administration simply cannot be an incompetent trainwreck and be all-powerful at the same time.
