Bin Laden's candidate
Serial slanderers like Dennis Hastert say terrorists want John Kerry to win. The facts say George W. Bush is al-Qaida's best recruitment tool.

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By Joe Conason

Sept. 24, 2004 | In recent days, the Republican campaign has descended still further into unrestrained fear-mongering. Not only would John Kerry's election put America in greater peril from terrorism, cry the party's spokesmen and their media enablers, but terrorists themselves are actually hoping that Kerry will defeat George W. Bush.

Such raw demagoguery is scarcely surprising in an election season as soiled as this one -- and even less so emanating from the mouth of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, the serial slanderer who insinuated last month that Democratic funder George Soros made his fortune from narcotics trafficking...

edited version:

Michael Scheuer, the CIA analyst and terrorism expert formerly known as Anonymous, agrees with the IISS findings and goes further. He has suggested that al-Qaida is likely so pleased with Bush that its agents might try to help his campaign. In an interview last summer, Scheuer told the Guardian that the White House and Department of Homeland Security alerts about a possible pre-election strike by the terrorists are credible but wrong about the purpose.

The aim would be not to depose the Bush administration but to "mount an attack that would rally the country around the president" and "keep the Republicans in power." As he put it, "I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now."

Like Schneider and Hastert, of course, Scheuer doesn't really know what al-Qaida wants. The terrorists are sure to continue their jihad against the United States and the West regardless of which party wins power -- but any realistic assessment of the "war on terrorism" is hardly flattering to those in power today.