One reason Bush has no interest in catching bin-Laden is that the right loves it whenever bin-Laden (or his digitized facsimile) shows up. Here’s David Brooks talking on the McNeil-Lehrer Hour last night.

DAVID BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times: No, ludicrous. I mean, on one hand, he’s a malevolent guy who killed 3,000 Americans. But you read this thing, and it’s like he’s been sitting around reading lefty blogs, and he’s one of these childish people posting rants at the bottom the page, you know, Noam Chomsky and all this stuff.

You can’t help read it and not laugh at it, occasionally, because it is just absurd. It’s flying this way, and that way, weird conspiracy theories, and mortgages, global warming. He throws it all in there.

The one thing that leapt out — and Bruce Hoffman and the others mentioned this — was how Western it is. And a friend of mine, Reuel Gerecht, points out that there’s this argument that Western ideas never permeated into the Arab world, but in fact it’s all — I mean, a lot of the worst ideas from the West have permeated in, and he’s picked up Noam Chomsky, and he’s picked up some of the anti-globalization stuff. And that’s what infuses this.

Maybe Reuel Gerecht is writing Bin-Laden’s script. Ever think of that? Could be why it is so ‘western’, and tends to echo mainstream critiques of the Bush administration. No?

I’m beyond taking bin-Laden tapes at face value. I simply suspend belief when I see these things. They always show up at opportune times (like a couple days before the ’04 election, or before a vote on war spending) and they always say exactly what Dick Cheney wants them to say. And then tools like Brooks go out and say that bin-Laden sounds just like a Democrat.

It’s all a strange coincidence? Here’s a tip.

The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to overstate the threat to stability posed by the al Qaeda leader in Iraq, The Washington Post reported on Monday.

According to the article, Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq, told a U.S. Army meeting last summer: “Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will — made him more important than he really is, in some ways.”

“The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends,” Harvey said in a transcript of the meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the Post reported.

Harvey said at the meeting that, while Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have carried out deadly bombing attacks, they remain “a very small part of the actual numbers,” according to the newspaper.

Largely aimed at Iraqis, the Zarqawi campaign began two years ago and was believed to be ongoing, the Post said. It has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts and at least one leak to an American journalist, the newspaper said.

Another military officer familiar with the program told the newspaper that the material was all in Arabic. But the officer said the Zarqawi campaign “probably raised his profile in the American press’s view,” the report said.

Zarqawi has a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head.

Officers familiar with the propaganda program were cited as saying that one goal was to drive a wedge into the insurgency by emphasizing Zarqawi’s terrorist acts and foreign origin.

“Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response,” a U.S. military briefing document from 2004 stated, the Post reported.

Zarqawi was a myth created originally for Iraqi consumption, and later used here as the evil face of the insurgency. Bin-Laden, at least at this point, is probably no different. Think that’s wacky? Larry Johnson worked in the CIA. He said this:

Frankly it would not surprise me to learn that the person appearing as Bin Laden is someone else. What’s with the beard dye? Is Bin Laden buying Grecian formula for facial hair? This video just does not make sense in either a strategic or tactical realm.

In summary: I no longer trust anything the administration says about the war or the so-called war on terrorism. Video tapes can be doctored.