BUT THE WHITE HOUSE DIDN'T SAY "RUMPLESTILTSKIN"!

Scott at Power Line:

In the new issue of the Weekly Standard, Steve Hayes and Tom Joscelyn document the lengths to which President Obama and other public officials have gone to make fools of themselves commenting on the attempted terrorist attack by Faisal Shahzad in Times Square. They note, for example, that attempted bombing is properly referred to on the White House Web site as "the Times Square incident."

In fact, Hayes and Joscelyn refer to "the 'Times Square incident,' as it is delicately called on the White House's website."

Um, Scott (and Steve and Tom)? Have you read your ideological soul mates in the past week?

National Review's Corner:

Times Square Incident Increasingly Appears 'Internationally' Coordinated

Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller:

The day after the Times Square incident, the Pakistani Taliban put out a video claiming responsibility....

Fox News's White House blog:

White House characterizes Times Square incident as attempted act of terrorism

(Emphasis added.)

Hayes and Joscelyn's main complaint is, of course, that the Obama administration doesn't refer to the incident "the Muslim Times Square jihadist total war terrorist Islamofascist bombing attempt at mass murder Allahu Akhbar." OK, I'm paraphasing; what they really say is:

There has been very little talk about the global war that the Obama administration sometimes acknowledges we are fighting and virtually nothing about what motivates our enemy: radical Islam.

... Janet Napolitano never used the word "terrorism" in her first appearance before Congress as secretary-designate of Homeland Security on January 15, 2009. Shortly thereafter, the Washington Post reported that the Obama administration had dropped the phrase "'Global War on Terror" in favor of "Overseas Contingency Operations." And just last month, we learned that the White House's forthcoming National Security Strategy would not use religious words such as "“jihad" and "Islamic extremism."

And heck, they've got a point, right? Using those phrases over and over again really helped us capture Osama bin Laden and enabled us to break up al-Qaeda and the Taliban during the Bush years. If we hadn't uttered those phrases so often, there'd still be a Taliban and an al-Qaeda. How horrible would that be? And bin Laden and Zawahri would still be alive!

Righties like the feeling they derive from uttering these words and phrases. Righties want to feel hate and have it acknowledged as virtuous. Righties think uttering bad words about terrorists is a substitute for action, more or less in the way that all of Ronald Reagan's talk about fiscal prudence made him, to them, more of a deficit hawk than Bill Clinton, who actually balanced a couple of budgets.

And righties like to feel they can order liberals around, in an infantile way. You didn't say "Rumplestiltskin"! You caught the would-be bomber, but you forgot to say "Simon says" (or rather, "Islamofascism")! So getting the guy doesn't count!