The non-bomb

We got lucky with the Times Square would-be bomber in a lot of ways, starting with his incompetence and the background of old-fashioned police work not involving torture. We’re also lucky that Times Square is in the state of New York and not Arizona so that the street-corner vendor who spotted the suspicious truck was not hostile to the police or afraid of having his papers checked. (For all we know, he’s a foreigner without a visa, but no one here has asked nor would particularly care.)

The whole incident illustrates the absurdity of justifying the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan and Pakistan in terms of protecting U.S. soil. Although incompetent nutcases can do plenty of damage, there’s no underlying threat to our society from a random bomb-thrower any more than from a turnpike sniper or a mad slasher loose on the subway. We fear such incidents and mourn their victims, but there is no way to completely eliminate such acts from biped DNA.

How much more threatening would the Taliban or other Asian political movements be if they had the sense to try to explain themselves and their goals to the U.S. populace instead of blowing up our streets? Can we imagine the North Vietnamese leadership responding to the reign of destruction they underwent in the 1960s and ’70s by planting a bomb on the New York city subway? They had far more sense than that, and they won.

It’s pathetic and sad to watch Obama bow and scrape with the loathesome and useless Afghan president who thumbs his nose at anyone standing in the way of his corrupt regime. He cashes in on the heroin trade and steals the election, but the United States can’t bear to admit defeat or face the wrath of the dead soldiers’ families whose kids got shot up to sustain this creep. Instead, we continue to feed on the fantasy that Times Square’s safety requires Nebraskans to traipse around Kandahar with guns.