Election Day Dirty Tricks: "Expert" Claims Osama bin Laden Wants Dems to Win

News Hounds
Nov. 09, 2006

Today the FOX & Friends crew and "expert" Neil Livingstone, a partisan guest if ever there was one, dragged out the old Osama bin Laden-loves-the-Democrats chestnut. These guys will stop at nothing to scare their voters to the polls.

NEIL LIVINGSTONE, author, AEI Speakers Bureau, CEO of GlobalOptions, Inc., : "I think he [Osama bin Laden] learned a lot last time. Now they did influence elections in Spain where Aznar was defeated after the Madrid bombings."

WRONG! Aznar was defeated because (a) over 90% of Spanish voters opposed Spain's participation in the Iraq war and (b) they were upset that Aznar blamed the bombings on home-grown ETA separatists despite evidence that it was an Al Qaeda operation.)

LIVINGSTONE: "They also influenced elections probably in the defeat of Berlusconi in Italy."

("Probably"?? Livingstone had no facts to offer?)

LIVINGSTONE: "But Europe is not the United States. In the United States security issues, defense issues normally break for the Republicans, so if they frighten people here, those are probably votes that are going to go to the Republicans."

GRETCHEN CARLSON: "And so, one is to assume that Osama bin Laden and all of his cohorts would love to see Democrats in power then, if you take that analogy to be true?"

LIVINGSTONE: "Well, they personalized this war on terror. They see Bush as their arch-enemy. They see the United States as their enemy. But what they'd like to do is to create chaos. They'd like to toss out or have the - uh -defeat the incumbent government here. They think that perhaps they could get a different party in power and that may have a positive impact on the war on terrorism, from their point of view. And so they'd like to influence the election here. But really, the only they could probably do that is to stay out of it."