Does Not Want

I'm guessing that on the list of endorsements, you'd put this one near the bottom.

Al-Qaeda is watching the U.S. stock market's downward slide with something akin to jubilation, with its leaders hailing the financial crisis as a vindication of its strategy of crippling America's economy through endless, costly foreign wars against Islamist insurgents.

And at least some of its supporters think Sen. John McCain is the presidential candidate best suited to continue that trend.

"Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election," said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the "failing march of his predecessor," President Bush.

McCain will not be buying a half-hour block of time for Al Qaeda to express their opinion, I'm guessing.

I'm sure the wingnuts will come up with some kind of reverse psychology to explain this ("They're saying they support McCain to help Obama!"), but of course these weren't public communications. And it's well established that George Bush has been a great boon to Al Qaeda's efforts on a variety of fronts, not the least of which is draining the public treasury through failed wars, crony capitalism and deregulation.

Boy, the McCain campaign REALLY wanted to change the subject on this today.

Jim Woolsey, the former CIA director who publicly connected Iraq to the 9/11 attacks without any evidence in 2001, and senior foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunemann spent more time whining about the Washington Post’s standards of fairness than on the logic of why Al Qaeda might prefer Sen. John McCain. “An amazing piece of journalism, and I use journalism in quotation marks,” Scheunemann said, going on to list barely approving quotes of Sen. Barack Obama from Hamas, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, which he said he wasn’t going “to characterize.” Woolsey, for his part, peered into the mind of what he called “one individual Islamist blogger from one terrorist Islamist blog” and determined that he was “clearly trying to damage John McCain” and “not speaking from his heart.”

What was absent from the call, oddly enough, was any discussion about why Al Qaeda might want McCain to win. And there the case is simple enough. Al Qaeda prefers an indefinite U.S. occupation of Iraq and a bellicose U.S. all across the Muslim world to radicalize Muslims to its terrorist cause and drain the U.S. of its financial wealth — what Osama bin Laden calls his “bleed to bankruptcy” strategy. Hence, the reason why, as the CIA eventually concluded, Bin Laden tried to help George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 by releasing a late-October tape. McCain pledges basic continuity with Bush on the Iraq war. As Scheunemann put it, “John McCain will spend what it takes to win.”

If Al Qaeda wanted to influence the US elections this year (though I don't think they'd be as successful), I think this just pre-empted it. And after four additional years of Bush thanks in part to that bin Laden tape, maybe the public would finally reject the idea that what a terrorist says has any bearing on the choice of our leaders.