Remora

Hail Freedonia.

The Washington Post piece on the failure to kill or capture Osama would make a nice script for a latter day Marx brothers film. You have the man directing the battle of Tora Bora from Tampa, Florida, no doubt operating on intelligence that Tampa was in imminent danger. You have Jethro Bodine as president. You have the escape of the Great Satan, Osama himself, from a redoubt of caves built in the 80s, no doubt with the aid of the always generous Freedonian Intelligence Agency. And you have an absence of suggestions as to where Satan flew to -- although perhaps we should check with our hundred percent ally in the war on terror, Pakistan, for that one:

"Another change since Tora Bora, with no immediate prospect of finding bin Laden, is that President Bush has stopped proclaiming the goal of taking him "dead or alive" and now avoids previous references to the al Qaeda founder as public enemy number one.

In an interview with The Washington Post in late December, Bush displayed a scorecard of al Qaeda leaders on which he had drawn the letter X through the faces of those thought dead. By last month, Bush began saying that continued public focus on individual terrorists, including bin Laden, meant that "people don't understand the scope of the mission."

"Terror is bigger than one person," Bush said March 14. "He's a person that's now been marginalized." The president said bin Laden had "met his match" and "may even be dead," and added: "I truly am not that concerned about him."

Top advisers now assert that the al Qaeda leader's fate should be no measure of U.S. success in the war."

Limited Inc has been quoting all the greats recently -- Burke, Spencer. The appropriate quote, here, is obviously from Duck Soup. This is Trentino, the wily ambassador from Sylvania, asking his henchmen about their progress in overthrowing the new president of Freedonia, Rufus T. Firefly:

Chicolini: Well, you remember you gave us a picture of this man and said, 'Follow him?'...Well, we get on-a the job right away and in-a one hour - even-a less than one hour...
Trentino (excitedly and expectantly): Yes?
Chicolini: We losa-a the picture. That's-a pretty quick work, eh?


Do they watch Duck Soup in the Pentagon? LI can't help but wonder about the scorecard in the delicious scene painted by the Post. Did some flunky get it as a historic souvenir? In any case, it is nice that the war against terrorism, our rulers have decided, isn't about anything so mundane as terrorists. This is a confidence builder. This is a lifter upper. This is a shot in the arm. Man, for a while Limited Inc was entertaining paranoid fantasies. LI is obviously unable to comprehend the sublime plan. LI is obviously not rolling. He should roll. Let's all roll is the slogan. Our war against the Shadow, LI misunderstood as a war against the guy who organized the group that attacked the World Trade Center. Damn, that is such short sighted thinking! Obviously, the Shadow is Saddam Hussein, who might not have had anything to do with the WTC, but was soooo disrespectful to Bush's father! Now of course, after the true enemy of all mankind -- Mullah Omar, I believe his name was -- has fallen, we can get serious.

Let's point out the obvious. This is an administration that performed dismally before 9/11, and they seem to be reverting to a mindset that would allow another 9/11. An inability, for one thing, to understand that an illorganized group of 19 dissatisfied Saudis can do more damage to the Heimat than S Hussein has ever done.

But LI imagines the scene in the DoD.

I mean, look what-a we got, boss! We got a missile defense, we got a great ally in this Sharon, we got a war with Saddam coming up, as soon as we can find a reason for it, and a place to launch it from! Plus Tom Ridge personally working on our security problem. Boss! Boss!