September 12, 2004—When Ronald Reagan passed away a few months ago, eulogies poured into Washington from around the world. One eulogy was inconspicuously absent–that of America's international Public Enemy Number One and arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden.
Speaking at a Cato Institute seminar on the War on Terrorism on September 8 in Washington, Professor Walid Phares, a Middle East expert at Florida Atlantic University, offered for the first time a quote attributed to Bin Laden that his colleague has penned in a forthcoming book. Bin Laden told Phares's colleague in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s: "I like Reagan. He believes in God. He's helping us. He's better than the others." The fact that George W. Bush considers himself the heir to Reagan's legacy and his policies, in addition to the fact that he never misses a chance to speak of his own devotion to God (even more so than Reagan ever did) and has brought almost every one of Reagan's cowboy operators into his administration, must also place him in the eyes of bin Laden as "better than the others."
Washington's heavily corporate-funded Cato Institute, a citadel of conservative and libertarian policy-making, is the least likely place one would expect to hear the Bush foreign policy wrung through the wringer. However, Cato has emerged as a key player in a conservative counter-attack against the neoconservative foreign policies enacted by Bush's inner circle of national security and defense advisers who have corrupted Republican ideology to the point where it would be unrecognizable to Barry Goldwater, Senator Bob Taft, Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon.
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http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/091204Madsen/091204madsen.html