So some guy named…

Faisal Shahzad buys a car on Craiglist under a false name, uses a disposable cell phone to do it (which the cops traced back to him), and immediately tries to skip the country back to the bosom of the Umma after the bomb he placed in the car failed to detonate in Times Square. What can we learn from this?

If you said, it was probably “somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill or something” then you may very well qualify to be the next chair of the Democratic party or a reporter or editor for a major MSM “news” organ.

If you said, “The lesson is: We need less intelligent investigative police methods and more torture, panic and hysteria!” you could well qualify to be a spokesman for Dick Cheney or most of the GOP leadership!

So far, what distinguishes this creep from Timothy McVeigh is a) that he was too stupid to build a functional bomb (thanks be to God) and that his flavor of political dementia is Islamic and not Homegrown White Nutjob. When white nutjobs fly their planes into IRS buildings, we don’t get calls for Salvation Through Leviathan by Any Means Necessary because everybody knows that Good White Christian folk, though they may get a bit carried away, do not necessitate the suspension of legal norms going back to Magna Carta or the granting of unilateral executive power to murder whosoever the President decides to kill. But in my comboxes, I’m already being informed by the usual (anonymous) suspects that

We just had another attempt by one of those nice (recently allowed to become an American citizen) muslim terrorists to blow up innocent Americans in New York City. He just made a mistake in setting off the bomb–otherwise it would have been a horrible tragedy.
But hay–I sure hope we do not ask him too many difficult questions and make him uncomfortable.

Yes. Because, of course, to oppose torture or to suggest that it provided not one single solitary bit of help in either preventing or solving this case is, of course, to be “soft on terror”. Always, with the Rubber Hose Right, the focus is not on what works, but on what feels brutally manly–and that from soft-handed laptop bombardiers who don’t even have the guts to write their names. They are so very courageous at sending somebody else to commit mortal sin in their place so that they can feel like they accomplished something.

Fact: torture neither prevented or solved this case. Good police work did.