Despite the fact that al-Qaeda recently endorsed John McCain, the Bush administration is warning that (deep from within Cheney's bunker) bin Laden is about to release a pre-election tape.  

'Magine that! Who saw this coming?  

And, let me guess what ol' bin-never-caught-by-Bush will have to say: "Barack Hussein Obama is obviously a brother of Islam, which is proven by his tendency toward socialist policies and by virtue of his having befriended 'domestic terr'ist' Bill Ayres."  

Yep, I think that will probably sum up the Bush administration's bin-Laden tape. 

meanwhile ….. 

A week ago, I had a long conversation with a four-star U.S. military officer who, until his recent retirement, had played a central role in directing the global war on terror. I asked him: what exactly is the strategy that guides the Bush administration's conduct of this war? His dismaying, if not exactly surprising, answer: there is none.  

President Bush will bequeath to his successor the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone. To defense contractors, lobbyists, think-tankers, ambitious military officers, the hosts of Sunday morning talk shows, and the Douglas Feith-like creatures who maneuver to become players in the ultimate power game, the Global War on Terror is a boon, an enterprise redolent with opportunity and promising to extend decades into the future.

Yet, to a considerable extent, that very enterprise has become a fiction, a gimmicky phrase employed to lend an appearance of cohesion to a panoply of activities that, in reality, are contradictory, counterproductive, or at the very least beside the point. In this sense, the global war on terror relates to terrorism precisely as the war on drugs relates to drug abuse and dependence: declaring a state of permanent "war" sustains the pretense of actually dealing with a serious problem, even as policymakers pay lip-service to the problem's actual sources.

The war on drugs is a very expensive fraud. So, too, is the Global War on Terror.  

The Next President & The Global War On Terror