"Bush Blew it on bin Laden" - great article from salon.com

[GeorgeBushytail]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/30/kerry_bin_laden/index_np.html

Great story on how Kerry is dealing with the OBL tape by coming straight at Bush.

---
On the late-night flight from Florida to Wisconsin -- usually a time for drinking and sleeping -- Kerry aides worked reporters on the press plane. Back in Washington, Kerry advisor Joe Lockhart held an unusual late-night conference call with reporters. Their predictable point: While the Bush team was accusing Kerry of making inappropriate, politically driven remarks about bin Laden Friday, the president crossed the line first and with much more partisan fervor.
---
Saturday morning, the Bush campaign pushed back, e-mailing reporters excerpts from columns by David Brooks and Bill Kristol excoriating Kerry for talking about Tora Bora on the day the tape was released. Kristol wrote: "Is there any development in the war on terror, however grave, that the Kerry campaign won't try to exploit for partisan advantage"?

Of course, Bush has built his entire campaign around the gravest "development" in the war on terror, the attacks of Sept. 11. He talks about the attacks every day on the stump, just as he did Saturday morning in his weekly radio address. "Since September the 11th, 2001, I have led a relentless campaign against the terrorists," Bush said.
---
By Saturday morning, McCurry seemed confident that the campaign had settled on a "winning argument" -- about bin Laden and about everything else. He said the bin Laden tape, together with the story of the missing munitions from Al Qaqaa, "crystallizes" the question facing voters Tuesday.

[Mugsy]

1. Seven Minutes

"We never thought that the high commander of the U.S. armies would leave 50,000 of his citizens in both towers to face the horrors alone. It appeared to him that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God."

- Osama bin Laden in his most recently released tape on October 29, 2004. Translation by al Jazeera.

*****
***** See the "BUSH SPLIT-SCREEN 9/11 video!
***** The "Bush in 30 Seconds" Archive: www.bi30archive.org
***** The largest collection of MoveOn.org contest ads on the web.
*****