Surprise Is No Surprise

With Kerry building up a seemingly unstoppable momentum in these final days, and the Al Qaqaa weapons fiasco being slowly and painfully nailed home, Karl Rove had to come up with something.

But is this it? The timing is very, very, very suspiscious. Bin Laden threatens new attacks:

Arabic TV station al-Jazeera has broadcast a videotape apparently featuring Osama Bin Laden, in which he threatens new attacks on the US.

In his opening remarks, the al-Qaeda leader accused President George W Bush of deceiving Americans in the years since the 11 September 2001 attacks.

He compared the Bush administration to what he termed corrupt Arab regimes...

Bin Laden said he first thought of attacking the US after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

He said the attacks on the US would have been less severe if President Bush had been more alert.

But he added that the security of the American people depended neither on Mr Bush nor on his challenger, John Kerry, but on US policy.

"The reasons to repeat what happened remain," he said.

If genuine, this is the first videotape of Bin Laden speaking to have surfaced since the US-led war in Afghanistan following the 11 September attacks, which he is generally thought to have masterminded.

It was not obvious when the video was recorded.

This tape can only help Bush at this stage, so what is bin Laden trying to achieve?

What if this tape has been in Bush's hands for months? Or what if - as many suspect - Bush's team knew about bin Laden's plans for 9/11 but let it happen anyway... could Bush and bin Laden still be co-operating? I know, I know - "Conspiracy Theories"! But if you had been writing this blog for the last year and a half like I have, by now you would be open to considering just about anything too.

Rove was always going to spring something by Friday, so the electorate would have the weekend to digest it and pass the news around, building an unstoppable wave of (presumably) righteous anger by Monday. Then off to the polls on Tuesday, blind to all reason.

Forget all the expensive advertising. Bin Laden's gloating "Face Of Evil" is exactly the image Rove wants in voters' minds right now. He just got it.

Josh Marshall says the GOP-friendly media outlets are already spinning this as "Osama's endorsement of John Kerry", even though the tape specifically says it is the US policies that need to change, not the candidate.