More on Boston

Slacktivist reminds us that targeting a sports event is nothing new: Anti-abortion bomber Eric Rudolph targeted the Olympics 17 years ago.
It’s a good reminder. There’s an annoying tendency to screen out all the terrorism that took place in this country pre-9/11: Labor and management targeting each other, the KKK, the radical left and segregationist right in the 1960s, black militants, Puerto Rican separatists, right-to-life killers … Yet by the early 1990s, I kept reading articles and columns that sounded if terrorism was something we’d never experienced. Even in the late nineties (post-Oklahoma City, post-Rudolph) I’d see articles written by supposed terrorism experts pondering with great seriousness what would happen if terrorism ever came to America’s shores. Guys (or women) it never left.
Also, this quote from Bruce Schneier:”Terrorism is a crime against the mind. What happened in Boston, horrific as it is, is theater to make you scared. That’s the point.”
And sometimes it works. Digby quotes Chris Hayes, who sees the same willingness to throw over the Constitution in some of the commentary. Digby also isn’t impressed by a reporter complaining how awful it is that they not only don’t have a suspect, they don’t know what kind of suspect: “We’re standing on the verge of a very important national conversation about something, and we have no idea what it is.” As Digby points out, you can do great reporting on a disaster without worrying about how the Big Picture is going to be spun.
The New Yorker, meanwhile, looks at how a Saudi man running from the blast was tackled because apparently he looked so much more suspicious than anyone else running and yelling. And the right-wing enthusiastically piled on with the He Must Have Done Somethings.
•Echidne of the Snakes has often suggested that to some rightwingers women are just aquariums—unimportant containers for the all-important fetus. And here we have a conservative Republican, NH State Rep. Peter Hansen who refers to men protecting “children and vaginas” (he does refer to “women and mothers” later in his letters).
•Not that it’s news but yes, the US did practice torture under George W. Bush.