OFFEND THEM! NO, DEFER TO THEM! NO, OFFEND THEM! NO, DEFER TO THEM!

Even before a Pakistani-American was arrested in connection with the failed Times Square car bombing, Bill Burck and Dana Perino were over at National Review's Corner fretting fearfully:

...Whoever tried to kill innocents in midtown Manhattan last night knew exactly what they were doing. They targeted Times Square in Manhattan not as a random act, but as a message that Americans remain vulnerable to indiscriminate murder for fanatical religious or political reasons, and that our most significant landmarks are not safe from attack....

This is a sobering message to all of us. And it should remind us that the federal officials who continue to insist that New York City is the best place to try KSM and other 9/11 terrorists are, frankly, out of their minds....

Those who claim, in spite of all logic and experience, that New York could be secured if KSM were brought there for trial are either being misleading or are plain old crazy. The only way to do this effectively would be to shut down the city....

Anyone see the irony in this? We now have a suspect in the Times Square incident who might have been trying to target Viacom because South Park poked fun at Muhammad. Right-wingers are forever railing against the rest of us because they think we defer excessively to Muslims' sensitivity regarding the depiction of Muhammad. But when there's a bombing attempt possibly motivated by that sensitivity, Burck and Perino tell us we actually should walk on eggshells -- in this case it's OK to say we must defer; we dare not try KSM in New York City, the right-wingers say.

And by the way, you do realize that they may well say the same thing about this suspect, don't you?

Right-wingers are always looking for ways to gin up outrage, and while up to this point, even as they've railed against the notion of trying foreign-born terrorism suspects in New York, they've ignored the fact that terrorism trials of U.S. citizens happen here all the time (for instance, last week authorities were on the verge of starting the trial of a former Brooklyn College student named Syed Hashmi when he pleaded guilty to providing material support to Al Qaeda), they may decide to start whining that it would be too dangerous to try the Times Square suspect here. And then, after that, they'll turn around and excoriate liberals for being excessively deferential on the subject of cartoons depicting Muhammad -- like the one that may well have motivated this alleged would-be bomber, whose trial they'll say requires excessive deference.

And around and around and around. Right-wingers get you coming and going.

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(Burck and Perino via Jonathan Bernstein's Plain Blog About Politics, which has been added to the blogroll.)