It’s really hard to fool all of the people all of the time if your underlings insist on fluffing their lines.

Who can forget the earnest assurances that President Bush has repeatedly given his fellow Americans about his relentless determination to hunt down and capture Osama bin Laden?

When it was reported in July 2006 that the CIA had “closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants”, President Bush and the usual bunch of suspect characters were there to explain to us how that didn’t mean we were letting up at all in our hunt for Osama. On the contrary, the unit had been closed down to facilitate the hunt. The message of the day was: “all the better to hunt Osama with”. (Or without? This Bush-speak does get a little confusing at times.)

Agency officials said that tracking Mr. bin Laden and his deputies remained a high priority, and that the decision to disband the unit was not a sign that the effort had slackened.
[...]
“The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as ever,” said Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a C.I.A. spokeswoman. “This is an agile agency, and the decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus.”

And then again as Bush’s fellow Americans started limbering up to vote last fall, the Bush-men dusted off the Osama bin Laden figurines, and put them back in the store window, and swore up and down that just because the figures had not been on display for a while didn’t mean that we’d forgotten about old Osama. No sir. The hunt wasn’t even on the back burner, but was the center of everyone’s entirely focused attention. Bush focused long enough to fire off words at Osama that were calculated to have Osama quaking in his shoes:

No matter how long it takes, America will find you, and we will bring you to justice.

For some reason that historians will no doubt debate vigorously, there is a tendency to dismiss statements like these by Bush as being insincere. So let there be no doubt that he meant every word. How do we know? Because he was making even more colorful statements off-the-record to his bum-chums, statements whose sincerity nobody can doubt:

Speaking of George Bush, with whom Sharon developed a very close relationship, Uri Dan recalls that Sharon‘s delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: “I will screw him in the ass!”

And we really left no stone unturned. After a while, when the hunt for Osama had dragged on for many years, many people became cynically convinced that nobody could find Osama. We turned that to our advantage. We put nobody in charge of finding him:

Today, however, no one person is in charge of the overall hunt for bin Laden with the authority to direct covert CIA operations to collect intelligence and to dispatch JSOC units. Some counterterrorism officials find this absurd. “There’s nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden!” one frustrated counterterrorism official shouted. “Nobody!”

And now Gen. Peter “Bigmouth” Schoomaker, the outgoing Army chief of staff, comes along, determined to provide further proof of my theory of how imminent retirement sets you free:

The Army’s highest-ranking officer said Friday that he was unsure whether the U.S. military would capture or kill Osama bin Laden, adding, “I don’t know that it’s all that important, frankly.”

“So we get him, and then what?” asked Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the outgoing Army chief of staff, at a Rotary Club of Fort Worth luncheon. “There’s a temporary feeling of goodness, but in the long run, we may make him bigger than he is today. … I’m not sure there’s that great of a return” on capturing or killing bin Laden.

I’m willing to swear under oath that Schoomaker was muttering to himself as he left the podium. Computer-enhanced NSA recordings of his muttering were made available to this reporter. The transcript reads: “And that’s for all the shit all of us had to put up with from Rumsfeld.”