Demagogue

I rather facetiously reported a while back two ex-hostages' claim that their captors in Iraq wanted Bush to win reelection. In the same spirit, I now offer irrefutable proof that the terrorists wanted Bush and Blair both to be reelected: They waited until July 2005 to bomb London.

Remember the wingnut (and, frankly, mainstream pundit) take on the Madrid bombings: they showed that al Qaeda wanted Aznar, who had joined Bush's coalition in Iraq, to lose the election, and the voters chose cowardice over honor in sending him into retirement. Well, since it worked then, you'd figure the bad guys would have known how to deep-six Bush's reelection: strike again (since Blair had no opposition that anyone could bring himself to vote for, even the Second Coming probably couldn't have changed the result in the U.K. in May).

This poll suggests that London bombings may finally have convinced the American public that the policy of randomly harrassing dark-skinned people in the U.S., torturing Muslims and Arabs at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, and occupying a major Arab country on the bais of flimsy and even falsified pretexts hasn't made us any safer from Muslim/Arab terrorism. Sure, Bush's approval rating stopped its recent free-fall with a within-the-margin-of-error increase, but the rest of the numbers show that people aren't buying the "taking the fight to them before they take it to us" hokum any more:

The proportion of respondents who said they believe the war in Iraq has made the United States less safe from terrorism jumped to 54 percent in the latest poll. That is a dramatic increase from 39 percent in the poll conducted June 29-30, a week before the London attacks....

The number who felt it was worth going to war dropped slightly. Forty-four percent believed it was worth it -- down from 46 percent in the June 24-26 survey. But 53 percent said it was not worth going to war, up 1 point since June 24-26. [both within the MOE, by the way]

These results aren't exactly surprising. Which is my point: if the terrorists wanted Kerry to win, they could have hit London last September, minimizing the rally 'round the incumbent reflex that an attack in the U.S. might have induced while maximizing the "what's the point of this stupid war?" reflex.

So, by the logic that conservatives have used against us time and again, I can conclude only one thing: al Qaeda voted for Dubya.