DON'T ...AND TELL ME IT'S RAINING

Insta-hack tried the other day, now Mickey Kaus plays Dean-gotcha.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked Dean where he'd prefer to see Osama bin Laden tried, should he be captured:

DEAN: You know, the truth is it doesn't make a lot of difference to me as long as he is brought to justice. I think that's the critical part of that.

MATTHEWS: How about Saddam Hussein? Should we try him in criminal and execute him...

DEAN: Again, we are allowing the Bosnian war criminals to be tried at The International Court in The Hague. That suits me fine. As long as they're brought to justice and tried, and so far we haven't had to have that discussion because the president has not been able to find either one of them.

Kaus thinks this could be used against Dean in the general election, as Willie Horton was used against Dukakis by Dubya's poppy. Well, Mickey, did you happen to pay attention to the words of just about every public figure in the months after 9/11? Virtually all of them said, in one form or another, that Osama should be "brought to justice". Nice try.

Then Mickey throws in something uh, interesting:

P.S.: Why do I think that if we have to give bin Laden a trial upon capture, we might choose not to capture him at all, but rather leave him at large (and relatively underpublicized) while we try to roll up his organization.

'Does Al Qaeda exist?'

'That, Mickey, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No. As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.'