I’ve returned to LA to find some very confusing news. Apparently, Osama Bin Laden is alive and living in Pakistan. At least, that’s what CNN says.

This is perplexing on many levels. For one, isn’t Pakistan our ally? Coulda sworn they were.

But mainly, who exactly is this “Osama bin Laden?”

It’s not a name you read about very often, and the article doesn’t really tell you much about him. He appears to linked to al Qaeda. Al Qaeda, you might remember, is a group that might have assisted Saddam Hussein in planning then 9/11 attacks. But they’re based in Iraq now, and there’s only a few of them left, fighting our forces hopelessly as the nation marches relentlessly towards freedom, peace, and democratic elections. This much I’m pretty sure of.

So what’s with this story? My guess is that it was planted by the Kerry people, or maybe even the Naderites, to distract attention from the demonstrable success of the Bush administration’s policies.

I’ve just Googled this “Osama bin Laden,” and there seems to be a lot of articles in the liberal media claiming that it was him who was responsible for 9/11 and thus the entire War on Terror. Also, there’s nothing in these yellow journals about him ever even visiting Iraq. What?

My memory’s not what it once was, but this seems pretty implausible. I mean, wouldn’t he be in the headlines a little more often if he was the guy responsible for the entire War and he was still out there, alive and plotting against our country? Wouldn’t we be devoting a few more resources towards hunting him down, sending our troops into the region, constructing some kind of net and tightening it day by day? Clearly, we would.

Fortunately, the other news services aren’t leading with this story, and that strikes me as a rare instance of journalistic responsibility. If all the other news outlets were to jump on this story and make a big deal about it, it could have some pretty serious consequences for the upcoming elections. And that would be imprudent, especially since I don’t recall a lot of stuff that definitively linked this “Osama bin Laden” to terrorism. I mean, there might have been some evidence, but I don’t recall it, and this election is too important to muddy it up with rumors and half-proven allegations.

9/11 was three years ago, after all. To say that we would have left its so-called “main architect” free to gambol around the hills of Pakistan and Afghanistan all this time while committing hundreds of thousands of troops to an area where he’d never even been seen, allowing thousands of our young, brave American soldiers to sacrifice their health or their actual lives in a place that was totally unrelated to the real war and its real villians - well, that’s just plain ridiculous, and I think that what this sort of story really shows is that the Kerry camp is getting desperate.

“Osama bin Laden.” Please. It doesn’t even sound like a real name.