Saturday, September 08, 2007

Osama is not a liberal.

As Chet Scoville of Vanity Press points out, he would be more at home with the rabid far right wing of the Republicans:

This game is really getting tiresome. As RT observes, no sooner does the new Bin Laden tape come out than some right-wingers notice nothing about it except that Bin Laden name-drops Noam Chomsky and mentions the Kyoto Protocol, and those same right-wingers reflexively say, "Ah ha!!!! See, he and the left really are the same!"

Let's take a closer look, shall we? ABC News has made a grainy little pdf transcript available here, and by looking it over (yeah, go ahead, it won't hurt you), we can see that OBL also makes the following assertions:

  • He says, right out loud, that his own "interests overlap with those of the major corporations and also with those of the neoconservatives."
  • He says that democratic capitalism is a failure because its taxes are too high.
  • He can't seem to tell the difference between lefty heroes John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.
  • And he says that theocracy is wicked cool, and that the division between church and state is a really bad idea.
Identical with the left? Nonsense.

But the thing is, this guy is not identical with the right either. He's not actually definable in right-left terms, and why should he be? For one thing, those are Western political terms, and he's not a Westerner. But more importantly, he's just not very lucid; his speech wanders all over the map without any kind of focus, centre, or discipline.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

A rich kid with no real work experience who finds religion after a misspent youth. Someone isn't very articulate, but knows he likes low tax rates.

He lives in a bubbles surrounded by sycophants and has a psychotic number two.

...damn, I forgot which one I was talking about.

ellroon said...

We're talking about the one who thinks God talks to him...

Steve Bates said...

Hmm. He's a dangerous man, with power disproportionate even to his excessive wealth. But he's also a religious nut-case and a spoiled rich brat who never really had to succeed at anything he did, because his family is so wealthy.

Um, who were we discussing?

ellroon said...

The one who thinks God chose him to lead the annointed army into the Holy land.

Anonymous said...

This gets so confusing. Maybe they were switched at birth when the Bush and bin Laden clans were summering in Maine...no, he's too tall to be a Bush.

ellroon said...

And as far as I can tell, he's able to speak in grammatically correct sentences.