Thursday, March 06, 2008

HOW STUPID IS JOHN HINDERAKER?

The headline chosen by Power Line's Hindrocket in response to the bombing at the Times Square recruiting center overnight is just idiotic:

Islamic Extremists or Code Pinkers?

As is this:

Given the increasing virulence of attacks on the military and on military recruiting facilities by antiwar groups like Code Pink, most notably the repeated confrontations in Berkeley, one could speculate that a liberal group is the most likely culprit.

First of all, when the hell have you known Islamicist extremists to time a bombing in order to minimize casualties? Hello? 9/11? 3/11? 7/7? Every jihadist suicide bombing ever? This thing happened at 3:43 A.M., according to The New York Times. You're a jihadist and you're going to waste a Times Square bomb on the few hours of the day when Times Square isn't packed with people? Really?

And why is the most likely culprit a "liberal group" -- as opposed to a group with an agenda utterly unrelated to the American left-right divide, or your garden-variety American lone nutjob? (An update at the Times link above says, "The authorities are looking into a possible connection to two earlier bombings at foreign consulates in Manhattan, in 2005 and 2007"; AP adds that these were the Mexican consulate and the British consulate. Go ahead, give yourself a headache trying to figure out why a "liberal group" woud do those things.)

And if Hindrocket is seeing "increasing virulence of attacks on the military and on military recruiting facilities," he hasn't been to Gotham much -- we're seeing next to nothing of that kind around these parts.

And I'd be delighted to see a list of Code Pink's terrorist bombings -- yelling in a really loud voice doesn't count. Besides, on the off chance that Code Pink did turn terrorist, I think Hillary Clinton's headquarters would be an equally likely target.

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By the way, I'm not going to go near the theory that Karl Rove is behind this, which has been raised by a Kos commenter and is already the subject of right-wing scorn. Not plausible -- Rove's style is much more along the lines of breathless announcements of massive plots that were thwarted just in the nick of time by the codpieced manliness of the Republican Party.

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