Al-Qaeda's Worst Nightmare?

Barack Hussein Obama:

Soon after the November election, al-Qaeda's No. 2 leader took stock of America's new president-elect and dismissed him with an insulting epithet. "A house Negro," Ayman al-Zawahiri said.

That was just a warm-up. In the weeks since, the terrorist group has unleashed a stream of verbal tirades against Barack Obama, each more venomous than the last. Obama has been called a "hypocrite," a "killer" of innocents, an "enemy of Muslims." He was even blamed for the Israeli military assault on Gaza, which began and ended before he took office.

"He kills your brothers and sisters in Gaza mercilessly and without affection," an al-Qaeda spokesman declared in a grainy Internet video this month.

The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaeda's skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaeda of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group.

With Obama, al-Qaeda faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: a U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who polls show is well liked throughout the Muslim world. * * *

As I was reading the above-linked article, I was reminded of when Bush sent Karen Hughes to the Muslim world in an attempt to rehabilitate America's image there. Her mission, of course, was doomed from the start and epitomized just how out-of-touch Bush and his people were with regard to how this country is perceived in the Middle East and beyond. I think it is interesting that Obama's landslide victory did more to repair America's image than BushCo could have ever dreamed of doing.

Barbara Boxer was right: elections really do have consequences.