Over at Greg Burch's blog Burchismo, grudging admiration for the clever text of the most recent bin Ladin video to surface...

ONE SMART S.O.B.

I've got to hand it to bin Laden. He really is one smart son of a bitch. I just read the transcript of his latest video. I strongly recommend it. He and his close advisers have been studying the West closely. This message is carefully crafted to plug into some very powerful currents in the left -- he uses Islamic rhetoric to push the basic Marxian buttons that lie beneath the ideology of the left in a very deft way. And then he turns and pushes Christian religious buttons. All the while, he plays the parallels to Vietnam, takes a side shot at race-guilt and even gets in a solid reference to the current credit melt-down in Western economies. Brilliant.

Prediction: None of the main organs of leftist communication, whether mainstream or extreme, will call him on the game he's playing here. It's too smooth and, compared to al Qaida's actual action, too gentle.

Good job, ObL! As a lawyer, I have to hand it to you.

Greg kindly provided a link to a PDF scan of an English-language translation of Osama's text. I hope a straight ASCII version shows up; I might tackle that myself while I'm doing chores this weekend.