Apparently, unable to contain his enthusiasm for bumming out the relatively nice and unsuspecting folks who make up much of the Western World, the misinformed medievalist has released another drearily threatening audiotape. Since the combined political, military, and intelligence resources of the civilized world cannot locate the potato head, we suggest the audiotape be taken as an opportunity to arrest him.



Here's how. Somebody buys the resourceful recluse a video camera and battery-powered lights. Since he long delighted to display his narcissistic self and give voice to his lamentable disjunction with informed thought, we assume that either he is not currently in possession of a video camera or that he is hunkered down in a hideout that is too dark to shoot anything but firearms.

It cannot be that he is afraid a video will reveal his location, because he always has the option of hanging the same kind of chintzy curtain behind him that his original second in medieval misguidance, Aman al-Zawahiri, uses when he comes out of the cave long enough for his eyes to adjust to the light to make an inflammatory video, with, we've noticed, production values that are on about the same level as a commercial for a discount chain that's struggling to get foothold in a Mexican border town.

The only condition is, upon receipt of the equipment, OBL has to agree to make a video about directions to his hideout. To prolong his short-lived celebrity, he can even deliver it in installments. The media will be wild for it.

We do not know why he will not accept this opportunity for the worldwide display of his long-cramped ego, because, at last report, he only had four wives, and, if he believes his own deadly dumb preachments, after he goes to the paradise of his overheated and woefully misguided imagination, he can have twenty-seven virgins.

Of course, we must interject that any man with four wives who would contemplate having twenty-seven virgins as a good time has done very little reflection on what it's really like to have four mates and has exceedingly little experience with virgins.

He needn't be excessively concerned about these impossible complications, however, because, as linguistic analysis has sometime ago revealed, the Arabic word for virgin may also mean grape, depending on whether or not it occurs with a grave. It appears that, in the particular context in which he has applied it to assure the ready suicide of fellow but somewhat more imbecilic emanations from The Dark Ages, the meaning is 27 grapes. So the mad, mad Muslims slammed into our World Trade Center – which was, in fact, a mutual treasure of the human race, erected to facilitate worldwide economic competence and development – and incinerated nearly three thousand of our beloved, hard-working and comparatively normal people did it to reap imaginary rewards they could have picked up at a fruit market.

Meanwhile, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, his lackey who's not an Iraqi, did his boss in absentia one better. Spiffily attired in black as a cool enemy of humanity, he rattled on with the same ill-informed drivel he and his mentor have both become wanted for, even by their own people.

Ah, what a toll we must pay for the deadly duo of ignorance and backwardness! Witness the unconscionable bombing in the Egyptian resort of Dahab, apparently timed to follow OBL's latest audio-only pontification.

How do people who have no feeling for their fellow human beings expect anyone to do anything but excoriate and execute them? Somebody ought to tell them that fellow-feeling is actually the major sentiment that makes the human race worthy of its own continuance upon this blessed but blighted earth.

As for OBL, when will some real-life Indiana Jones find out where he is hiding, so we can finally give the misguided pest his overdue rest?