I’ve been away from non-print media for a few days. Are the right-wingers still cackling about the fact that those durn libruls were wrong about the sniper being an angry white male?

Well, no matter. The profilers (liberals? think these folks are sitting around debating the departure of Christopher Hitchens from The Nation?) weren’t just wrong about race -- they were wrong six ways from Sunday. Remember, we were supposed to be dealing with a couple of teenagers or a firefighter or a 26-year-old with a buzz cut. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

What fools we’ve been for paying attention to profilers.

Recall the profile of the Unabomber: He was supposed to be in his thirties or forties (Kaczynski was a decade or two older); he was supposed to be a guy who hadn’t managed get through college but hung out on campuses (rather than an ex-professor living deliberately distancing himself from academe).

And recall, from last May, this profile of the mailbox bomber -- someone “older” (“This guy didn't just fall off of a turnip truck”), “one person or a small, small group of participants, people who have known each other for a long time or shared distrust of the government, tax issues, health issues, land use, grazing rights.” The bomber turned out to be a 21-year-old kid who believed in astral projection ("He didn't think people really died; they just moved on to other places. We were like, 'Whatever'") and was trying to use bombs to make a happy face.

Profiling is a scam. Maybe now it can be plopped on top of phrenology on the ash heap of pseudo-science.