Osama bin Laden Makes Point
Or rather, which finger is he pointing?
Did he just pull it out of his mouth so he could make important decisions? Did he just pull it out of his nose so he could salt his meal? Did he just pull it out of his ear as a dip-stick to see how much his brain shrunk today? Did he just pull it out of........well, I'll let you play with that one.
While there are probably a lot of people out there who would be quite content never to read another letter about Osama bin Laden, there is a tortured quality to bin Laden's reasoning, a careful avoidance of obvious conclusions, and a painstaking circumnavigation of embarrassing facts. One of the first facts we should face is that the next time bin Laden decides to pit race against race, religion against religion, and country against country, he should think to himself, cui bono? -- who benefits? To ignore this issue is to incite an atmosphere of violence and endangerment toward the good men, women, and children of this state. Here, too, the exception proves the rule: I can no longer get very excited about any revelation of his hypocrisy or crookedness. It's what I've come to expect by now. Two quick comments: 1) It's likely that before the year is over bin Laden will pander to our worst fears if we don't stop him now, and 2) his primitive, unsympathetic stances combine, in a rare mixture, bestial cruelty and an inconceivable gift for lying. News of this deviousness must spread like wildfire if we are ever to invigorate the effort to reach solutions by increasing the scope of the inquiry, rather than by narrowing or abandoning it. To recap the main points made in this letter: 1) those who think that Osama bin Laden's insinuations enhance performance standards, productivity, and competitiveness should think again, 2) by next weekend, his attitudes will degenerate into hotbeds of rumor and innuendo, and 3) if we let him steal our birthrights, civilization itself will fall.
