By Robert Stacy McCain
This morning’s headline at ViralRead:
Trying to focus on the crucial facts
of the story can be difficult, when cable TV news is full of
time-filling chatter about things that aren’t actually news, alternating
with the dramatic reiteration of banal facts that everybody with
Internet access knew about 12 or 18 hours ago. Three people killed. Legs
blown off. Seventeen people hospitalized in critical condition. “A city
mourns.” All of this chatter from talking heads, while the familiar
video footage rolls on split-screen.
Damn, I hate TV news.
Meanwhile, the New York Times does some good reporting:
The scale of the attack and the crude
nature of the explosives, coupled with the lack of anyone claiming to have been
the perpetrator, suggested to experts that the attacker could be an individual
or a small group rather than an established terrorist organization. …
Nonetheless, a senior law enforcement
official said that authorities were also looking into connections between
pressure cookers and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Qaeda franchise in
Yemen, largely because the design of the explosive device was described in a
2010 issue of the group’s online English magazine, Inspire.
“The pressurized cooker is the most
effective method,” the article said. “Glue the shrapnel to the inside of the
pressurized cooker.” The article was titled “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your
Mom.” ….
Rudimentary explosive devices made from
pressure cookers have been widely used in attacks in Afghanistan, India, Nepal
and Pakistan, all countries where the cooking device is common, according to a
Department of Homeland Security warning notice issued in 2010.
But they have occasionally
turned up in attacks in the United States as well:Faisal Shahzad, an American
citizen who attempted a car-bomb attack on Times Square in May 2010, had a
pressure cooker loaded with 120 firecrackers among the improvised explosives in
his S.U.V. The devices smoked but never exploded.
Watching TV last
night — no need to identify the particular cable-news host, since
they’re all equally idiotic nowadays — I heard the question asked, What does the type of bomb tell us about why someone did this?
The
honest answer would have been, “Absolutely nothing,” but the guest
“expert” said something a bit more clever than that, because saying
clever things — rather than honest things — is what TV news is about.
Look: I understand the desire to know the motive behind this atrocity, but until we know who did it, we can’t possibly know why they did it and, in remarking the media’s premature obsession with “why,” Da Tech Guy is compelled to quote Monty Python dialogue.
That’s how blatant the media’s absurdity has become: We cannot understand it except in terms of its joke value.
Complaining about media, however, is not news, so I don’t have much time for it today, except to briefly note the exemplary douchebaggery of Salon’s David Sirota, the guy who says it is crucially important that a “white American” be apprehended for this terrorist deed.
Yeah, that sums it up pretty good, although it must be admitted that some conservatives were a bit too quick to jump on the reports that a Saudi student was a suspect. Of course, those reports were based on actual facts — cops grabbed this guy running from the scene of the bombings and served a search warrant at his apartment — rather than mere political convenience, but I kept emphasizing the obvious truth that we don’t know jack shit yet.
There
is a regrettable tendency to play Internet Detective in situations like
this, to imagine that bloggers can solve the mystery by clicking around
the Web, even while there is an entire Joint Terrorism Task Force
– experienced professionals with direct access to evidence – working
night and day to find the perpetrators of this horrible act.
Who did it? What do we know? Both Ed Driscoll and Allahpundit have
examined the mystification of “experts,” one of whom, Mark Pitcavage,
is a ridiculous academic douchebag who got a million-dollar federal grant from Janet Reno’s DOJ back in the 1990s
to train law enforcement about the dangers of domestic right-wing
militias, thus wasting money to completely distract cops from the kind
of terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks — but NEVER FUCKING MIND
THAT, OK?
Angry? Never mind. My anger is irrelevant at this point, and both Pitcavage and his fellow “hate” expert Mark Potok seem to be correct
in saying that there’s something screwy about this bombing attack on
the Boston Marathon. It seems too puny and crude to be an Al-Qaeda
attack, nor does the targeting of this event seem to fit the profile
of the typical domestic “anti-government” terrorist.
So, unusual crime . . . unusual motive? Unusual perpetrator?
That’s
just speculation, of course, but it’s a scenario we can’t rule
out: This evil act might be the work someone whose motives don’t fit
neatly within the political categories we think of when we think of
terrorism. Maybe it’s somebody like “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski,
a deranged sociopath crazy enough to want to blow people up, but cunning
enough to get away with it for years.
And now . . . back to the news.
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