Although I haven’t seen this anywhere yet (not that I’m looking especially hard), I’m sure there’s a right-winger or disappointed birther out there somewhere who thinks we’ve known about bin Laden’s whereabouts all along, and that President Obama wanted to knock him off in the fall of next year as the ultimate October Surprise, but had to move up the timetable because of WikiLeaks, or a crease in Hillary’s pantsuit, or something. Although the White House isn’t helping itself very much with its serial fumbles in the aftermath, I hope this particular conspiracy doesn’t catch on.
I do recall that there were a lot of folks on the left who believed this about President Bush in 2004. What Christopher Hitchens wrote about the matter then applies now (with “Axelrod” swapped out for “Rove”):
What will it take to convince these people that this is not a year, or a time, to be dicking around? Americans are patrolling a front line in Afghanistan, where it would be impossible with 10 times the troop strength to protect all potential voters on Oct. 9 [the date of Afghan elections in 2004] from Taliban/al-Qaida murder and sabotage. We are invited to believe that these hard-pressed soldiers of ours take time off to keep Osama Bin Laden in a secret cave, ready to uncork him when they get a call from Karl Rove? For shame.