OSAMA SURPRISE

More than three years after the deadliest terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Saudi mastermind Osama bin Laden — remember the guy Bush vowed to catch "dead or alive"? — released a new videotape in which he appears to be in good health.

Bin Laden took direct responsibility for ordering the attacks, unwittingly highlighting Bush's abject failure to capture him.

"It appeared to him (Bush) that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God," he said.

Could this be the October surprise theorized about by conspiracy theorists? In some ways, it's worse: Chasing bad guy du jour Saddam Hussein in what Cheney calls a "spectacular success," the Bush administration has failed the United States and its people.