Osama Bin Laden tripped up

Dear Scratching Post readers,

The animals and I were thrilled today to receive our first set of marching orders from our masters at stoptheaclu. In addition to being obedient robots, we thought we’d help them out by amplifying their message.

Please share this info with your readers.

Aha! A call to arms! We leap into action! Jacob is running furiously on his exercise wheel and K T has her face buried in her food dish.

Link to post at stoptheaclu.com

Osama bin Laden promised never to be captured alive and declared the U.S. had resorted to the same "repressive" tactics used by Saddam Hussein, according to an audiotape purportedly by the al-Qaida leader that was posted Monday on a militant Web site.

A militant website? Darn those militant websites! I’ll bet they’re the source of all those denial of service attacks. My website isn’t militant. It just kind of sits there. I mean, I don’t think it’s militant. I’m not watching it all the time and Lord knows the animals have more important things to do.

The tape appeared to be a complete version of one that was first broadcast Jan. 19 on Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite channel, in which bin Laden offered the United States a long-term truce but also said his al-Qaida terror network would soon launch a fresh attack on American soil.

Well, that tears it. A fresh attack on American soil. Just wait until the people at Proctor and Gamble hear about this. Or anyone else in the fabric care industry, for that matter. Enemy attacks on American soil are a direct threat to the dry cleaning and detergent industrial base that forms the foundation of our great land. This cannot be allowed to occur!

"I have sworn to only live free. Even if I find bitter the taste of death, I don't want to die humiliated or deceived," bin Laden said.

Here Osama Bin Laden makes a crucial mistake. He reveals that he is an obsessive coupon clipper. “I have sworn to only live free.” We’ve got him now. Put out an APB for an Arabic man in a supermarket checkout line with a purse filled with coupons. OK, OK, it’s not really a purse. I mean, girls carry purses. Men carry those fanny pack things. And OBL, being a very manly man, would never carry a purse. His fanny pack would be a manly color. Like black.

In drawing the comparison to American military behavior in Iraq to that of Saddam, the speaker said:
"The jihad is continuing with strength, for Allah be all the credit, despite all the barbarity, the repressive steps taken by the American Army and its agents, to the extent that there is no longer any mentionable difference between this criminality and the criminality of Saddam."

Next time could we please have an English speaker record these OBL messages? What on Earth does this mean? It’s gibberish. Have fun diagramming that sentence. The subject is “The jihad” and the verb is “is continuing.” “Despite all the barbarity” is a modifier for the verb, but everything after that seems detached.

Wait a minute. Check this out. Let’s reconstruct the sentence from its component parts.

“The jihad is continuing.”

“The jihad is continuing with strength.”

“The jihad is continuing with strength to the extent that there is no difference between this criminality and the criminality of Saddam.”

GOT IT!

That last clause modifies the original verb! OBL is calling his movement a criminal enterprise. What a dope! Perhaps he has an inferiority complex. Maybe he’s turning out like Howard Hughes. Howard was a millionaire who lived in a cave, too.

But I digress. Let’s finish that last sentence by paraphrasing it.

“The jihad is continuing with strength as a criminal enterprise because Allah wills it despite the best efforts of the Americans and their allies.”

Well, that’s a slogan I’m sure we can all support. Err, maybe not. And I’m not so sure I want to go around saying that Allah is backing criminal enterprises. Once He leaves the DA’s office, He’s going to come looking for the guy what ratted Him out. All those deaths by lightning could have been accidents, but I’m not taking any chances by turning state’s evidence on the Big Man.

So here’s what we’ve learned: OBL is a detergent manufacturer who clips coupons and speaks in gibberish who’s on the lam from Allah. OK, CIA, there’s your lead. Now run with it. You’re welcome.

Well that’s all for now, folks. The staff here at The Scratching Post has got a lot on their plates today. Jacob has to crawl into his den to sleep, K T has to go and contemplate the meaning of the universe while sprawled out on my son’s bed and I need to decide whether this is called “The Scratching Post” or the “Scratching Post” since I seem to be inconsistent in my capitalization of the definite article in our title.

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