Bushophobia's Greatest Hits

The Left's 2005 World Tour of anti-Dubya retreads rolls on:

The U.S. had "definitive intelligence" that Osama bin Laden was among hundreds of al-Qaida terrorists who fled the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan in December 2001, the CIA agent in charge of the operation to nab the top terrorist is claiming.

But because of a bungled strategy by the Bush Administration, the 9/11 mastermind got away.

The shopworn allegation has appeared over and over since bin Laden's Taliban protectors were routed - and was most recently recycled by 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry.

Now Newsweek magazine is trying to gin up the same old discredited story again, with an "exclusive" report on a new book by Gary Berntsen.

Sounds like the latest shuffle from the Gotcha Roladex. Now they've gotten back to late 2001; at this rate they'll be refighting the Florida Insurrection sometime after Labor Day, and fresh allegations of GDub and Jeb running cocaine shipments out of Mena, Arkansas should be raging by Thanksgiving.

In the meantime, this smear remains as bogus as all its fellows:

Still, the man who would know the truth has never subscribed to the notion that the 9/11 killer slipped the noose at Tora Bora.

"We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Centcom Commander Tommy Franks told the New York Times last year. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp."

If given the choice of taking the word of General Franks or a book-hawking ex-member of an organization that is rabidly Bushophobic, has gotten every major intelligence call of the past generation flagrantly wrong, and is overtly trying to downplay the Iranian nuclear threat for no other reason than to intimidate White House foreign policymakers - heck, that takes even less skullsweat than went into CIA's "mullahs are ten years away from nukes, just like we said they were ten years ago" quizkidism.

If the President would just go on the PR offensive against these numbnuts, it would be like sport fishing with power saws.