Forging The Finest Print

Thursday, January 19, 2006

bin Laden Video Blogging Forging the finest print

That center of gravity of the jihadist movement spoke again on yet another video tape, offering, get this, a truce.

This video clip is 4.60 MB, and comes from this guy.

UBL video download. The file is a WMV, so it should be fine in the Windows Media Player.
How lame, he's citing polling data to justify his points! It makes me wonder if anyone is still capable of standing on firm philisophical ground anymore. Surely, there's someone that doesn't rely on such intellectual sloth!

Next is the reactionary punditry. This one's Chris Mattews from Hardball. The clip is once again from Ian Black. This one's only 991 KB, so the poor souls on dialup shouldn't be too troubled by it.
Osama is eight feet tall?
He is indeed tall and waify, at around 6,5" and 160 pounds (195cm and 75kg in metrics), but is not a legendary giant.

This next one is painful. CNN has gotten too into the habit of obscuring the boundry between pure news and editorializing.

Jack Cafferty thinks bin Laden and the president are collaborating.

This one's 4.79 MB, so if you want to pass on it, here's a bit from the transcript:

JACK CAFFERTY: "The last time we got a tape from Osama bin Laden was right before the 2004 presidential election. Now here we are four days away from hearings starting in Washington into the wire tapping of America’s telephones without bothering to get a court order or a warrant, and up pops another tape from Osama bin Laden. Coincidence? Who knows?"

Cafferty's been a news ancher all his professional life, not an opinion writer, but he has gotten into the habit of getting into rabid cross-talk on the weekend shows like Moneyline and The Capital Gang. What may be appropriate there isn't the right decorum for a program that's supposed to be hard journalism, Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room, which airs weekday afternoons.
The synthesis of the two forms can be confusing and dangerous to the network, and it is my opinion that CNN needs to better segregate the two forms.

We can't be sure why he released the tape, but it's interesting that it's audio only. This suggests to me that the tape was rushed ad hoc after the recent airstrike that killed AQ's chief bomb-maker. He of course loves using his podium to fluster Washington. Just look what it accomplishes, it breeds battles in America's capitol! Raw politics is bin Laden's only friend now.

Published by Typewriter King | 6:27 PM

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