Logic Fails

It took a couple of readings before this piece by Jamison Foser at Media Matters really sunk in:

If you believe what you hear from prominent conservatives and political reporters, the following things are true:

1) Anytime terrorism is in the news, it plays to the political and electoral benefit of the Republicans.
2) Terrorists who are trying to destroy America are trying to help elect Democrats because they think Democrats are weak. The terrorists are doing so by increasing violence in Iraq and otherwise drawing attention to their existence, as the Osama bin Laden videotape released shortly before the 2004 election.

Those two things are obviously incompatible. The latter is based on the premise that increased news of terrorism benefits Democrats; the former is an explicit statement of the opposite.

I don't expect such a deconstruction of the Republican's faulty logic to do much to convince voters. But I do think that the message of fear is losing its impact. People just aren't buying it anymore, not because of any careful logical analysis, but because of the immensity of the gap between Bush's rhetoric and the reality.
Osama bin Laden attacked us 5 years, 1 month and 11 days ago. Since then, he's only been sighted in occasional home movies and in GOP attack ads. You don't think people haven't noticed he's still at large?
We've been bogged down in Iraq since early 2003. We have failed to find any WMDs, failed to identify any connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and failed to transform the Middle East into a garden of democracy and freedom. Instead, we're caught in a bloody sectarian civil war that has nothing to do with our reasons for going in. You don't think people haven't noticed that our government no clue as to how to extract ourselves from this mess?