OBL's Tape

Osama's tape has already been commented on countless times, so, I'll be quick and try to say something new:

Didn't the Bush administration fret and fret and fret and even suggest a contingency plan that involved postponing the election in the wake of a terrorist attack?

And we get... a tepid tape from Osama?

No complaint from me, let him lob tapes instead of bombs. But it makes me wonder how much (or, more to the point, how little) Bush's intelligence apparatus really knows about OBL's capabilities in 2004 and how much they're telling us. Because it's seemed to me, during the three years after the Afghanistan war, that Al-Qaeda's abilities get hyped beyond whenever it serves the Administration's purposes to have us feeling scared.

But I'm left with the impression that the Bush administration has really know idea what Al-Qaeda can and can't do at this point. And that's, perhaps, Bush's biggest War on Terrorism failure.