DO THEY STILL KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SADDAM AND BIN LADEN?: A former--and dearly missed--TNR colleague writes:
Am I the only one who thought Bush's confusion of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden early in the debate was telling? (I actually predicted before the debate that he would do this and it would hurt him--half right, I guess.) This is the third time in the last couple of weeks, I think, that a top Bush official has said "Saddam" when he meant "bin Laden." Rumsfeld did it twice in the same speech earlier this month. (He corrected himself the first time, but that didn't stop him from later comically asserting, "Saddam Hussein, if he's alive, is spending a whale of a lot of time trying to not get caught. And we've not seen him on a video since 2001.")
The fact that this transposition has happened repeatedly doesn't strike me as a coincidence. I think at any given time since the Cold War, the country has had (at most) one larger-than-life diabolical foreign villain (usually compared to a greater or lesser degree to Hitler): Saddam, Qaddafi, Milosevic, bin Laden, Saddam again. The Bushies have gone to great lengths to conflate Saddam and bin Laden in the public mind, or even displace the latter in favor of the former as U.S. enemy #1. The fact that they've now verbally confused the two (at least) three times in the last few weeks suggests to me they've pushed the idea so hard that even they are having trouble keeping the two men straight. I'm a little disturbed that no one else seems to consider this a big deal.
I, for one, consider this a big deal.
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