Al Qaeda Endorses Kerry

I may not be Arab, Muslim, or 6 feet 5 inches tall, but there is one thing I apparently have in common with Osama bin Laden: both of us want John Kerry to win:

House Speaker Dennis Hastert said Saturday that he believes Al Qaeda operatives will use terrorism to try to influence the Nov. 2 election to sway opinion toward Democrat John Kerry over President Bush.
“I don’t have data or intelligence to tell me one thing or another, [but] I would think they would be more apt to go [for] somebody who would file a lawsuit with the World Court or something rather than respond with troops,” said Hastert, a Republican from Plano.
Asked directly by reporters whether he believed Al Qaeda could operate better with Kerry in the White House, Hastert replied, “That’s my opinion, yes.”

Lovely. Of course Hastert doesn’t have any evidence to support his fear mongering, it’s just something in his gut he feels compelled to share. Vote for my party or you risk being killed.
These people disgust me.
UPDATE: In the comments, Len Cleavelin points to Juan Cole’s post on this. Bottom line: Al Qaeda really doesn’t care who is president:

Al-Qaeda does not care who wins the elections. If the US withdraws from Iraq (which could happen willy-nilly under Bush as easily as under Kerry), that would be seen as a victory by al-Qaeda. If the US remains in Iraq for years, bleeding at the hands of an ongoing guerrilla insurgency, then that is also a victory for al-Qaeda from their point of view. They therefore just don’t care which candidate wins. They hate general US policy in the Middle East, which would not change drastically under Kerry. To any extent that al-Qaeda is giving serious thought to the US elections, it would see no significant difference between the candidates. But given its goal of creating more polarization between the US and the Muslim World, it is entirely possible that the al-Qaeda leadership would prefer Bush, since they want to “sharpen the contradictions.”

I haven’t read any surveys of al Qaeda, but I think this is right. It’s not about our president, it’s not about our “freedoms”–it’s about our policy. But that’s a topic for a separate post.