The Most Powerful Man in the World
He's tall, he's rich, and he walks with a swagger only confidence can bring. He is a man many people think is guided by God. He has friends and business connections across the world, from Boston to Saudi Arabia. He doesn't drink, keeps his head clear, and likes nothing better than a good, strong cup of coffee to start the day. And he has a great fondness for guns, especially of the fully automatic assault variety.
He's Osama bin Laden, and the world is his oyster.
He's more popular than the Pope, and just as hard to get an audience with. His videos are watched by more people than anyone's but Disney's, and if it weren't for some nasty immigration difficulties, he'd be at the top of the Hollywood A-list with more contracts than you can shake a Kalashnikov at.
For as the saying goes, any press is good press, and Osama has no shortage of it.
His latest appearance came in the form of an October surprise that Republicans will deny they were pleased to see, but should thank their lucky stars they did. For if they will have one person on this planet to thank for a second term in office, it will be the Saudi terrorist with the weak kidneys and the impossibly long stride.
He got seriously, tragically, lucky three years ago, pulling off a terror attack that even Jerry Bruckheimer would have had a hard time making believable, and has since sat back and watched America not only drive itself mad with fear, but slowly destroy all it holds dear in an insane attempt to protect it.
The United States has gone so far past eating its own tail that it's dining on the soft, chewy bits.
America the free is now America the fortress; the home of the brave is now the home of the besieged. What America has stood for and spent two centuries nurturing and protecting, namely free speech, a free press, and the right to universal suffrage (something much of the world has admired and tried to emulate), has been not so much wiped away as turned into a nasty punch line to the world's most sickening joke.
The American Constitution? Great idea, but a bit passé...better check with Karl Rove, instead.
Fear is a lovely tool, the more irrational the better, and while every poll in the land has George Bush in a statistical deadlock with his waffling opponent, any pollster will tell you that if it weren't for the present fear of terrorism, Kerry would have this election wrapped up much as Clinton and Reagan before him, both first timers facing flawed incumbents. There would be no need for 17,000 lawyers, 600 million dollars in ad campaigns, or Swift Boat Veterans for Smear, and George Bush would be back to chasing armadillos around the ranch with his mountain bike.
He's an ineffectual president who has done far more harm than good on any scale or criteria you can pick except one: he's scared the hell out of his country, and has worked every ounce of it to his advantage.
Osama wouldn't have it any other way.
America is now his greatest recruiter. Where once there were only a handful of terrorists, thousands are now being created faster than a den of cockroaches in an east-side flat. The middle-east is being force-fed the American way of life at the end of a gun, with 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians at last estimate, and the democracy they are told to follow is one where it costs billions to get your man elected, free protest will be stopped by threat of arrest, and who gets to vote is as much a factor of your skin colour or bank account balance as it is your citizenship.
It's a fine example, at least when you're a fundamentalist Muslim with a serious hard-on for getting people to do more than boycott Saturday Night Live.
He's a sick man living in a hole somewhere in the Afghan mountains, yet a flick of his wrist or a wry smile can cause markets to jitter and people to duck and cover faster than you can say "Cuban Missile Crisis." His mere existence has been cause enough for a group of men to hijack all that America holds dear, and for America to let them. He needs to do no more than put out the odd Christmas video to keep his terror train running, to keep America scared, to keep the middle-east in a quagmire and to give fits to anyone who ever thought Oslo was more than just the capital of Norway
And that, my friends, is power.
