Red Herrings, anyone?

Salon has two interesting OP-ED's on Zarqawi's demise; Conason's "Death of a Useful Demon" and Shapiro's "Good Things, Bad Presidents".

What will emerge, no doubt, from the death of this total sonabitch will be BushCo's attempt to cast this as some kind of divine vindication for the last three nightmare years, or as Conason puts it, a "see, I told you so". The way that this is likely to play out is the reintroduction of the talking point about Al Quaida in Iraq: They were always there.

This, of course, is utter bunk, but in the days when BushCo's PR firm are able to sell that bullshit are dwindling to the brand-faithful, it become useful for them, especially with important midterms coming up, to get everybody back on message, especially with this quagmire. Somehow, Iraq was involved with 9/11.

As a corollary, I would expect that much more strident efforts by the administration to discredit the anti war movement as disloyal and unpatriotic, or worse, to lull people into a false sense of "whew...glad that's over". It's not. Zarqawi was the insurgent version of a carpetbagger: He had an agenda, and while it was in a simpatico with the Iraqi insurgents, it wasn't the same. His agenda was Bin Laden's: Destroy the Heathen Capitalist Hypocrites. The bulk of the insurgency's: Get the fuck out of my country. This, of course, is before the "Hey, remember what those other guy's did to us...vengeance is mine". With the latter, Zarqawi's death means jack shit to them.

Update: via Covington, "Revenge Fantasies from the wrong side of the blogosphere Here. And just for kicks, lets see some actual erudite commentary. Oh, whatever, nevermind.

Update 06.11.06: Wes can sure kick up a shitstorm. Pay attention to the TMJ...I think he's CoIntelPro. Thanks Wes...holla when you're in town again.