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Morning Jolt April 23, 2013 They're the Bombers. I Want the Surviving Brother to Suffer. Deal with It. A reader complains that I have referred to the infamous pair of brothers as "the bombers" instead of "the alleged bombers." The presumption of innocence applies to proceedings in a court of law, not public opinion or private opinions. If you believe that, say, a particular Heisman Trophy winner killed his wife and a waiter back in the mid-90s, you're free to say so. A figure who is accused of crime in print or in a public forum could, presumably, sue for libel, but you and I know that this guy's spending the rest of his life in a hospital room, a courtroom, and a jail cell. But, to refresh, we've got video of the two brothers arriving at the bombing site with backpacks, then a photo of one of the brothers next to Martin Richard, the boy who was killed in the blast, with the backpack on the ground. Reportedly authorities have video of one of them dropping the backpack at one of the two sites of the bomb blast. There's a photo of the younger brother leaving the scene, missing the backpack, and his face not expressing shock, horror, and fear like everyone around him. Then we have the brothers carjacking someone and telling the victim:
Then we have the police encountering them and dodging similar homemade explosives from the pair Thursday night; then we have the younger brother finally being found in that boat. And that's before we get into any evidence of relatives or acquaintances describing the pair as engaging in behavior typical of jihadists. Finally, there's the UMass-Dartmouth vanity plate, "Terrorista #1." Show me any scenario, beyond any grand sinister government conspiracy worthy of the most paranoid mind, that these two guys aren't the bombers. Beyond the insistence that we deny the obvious conclusion of everything we've seen and heard in the past week, there seems to be a bit of public tsk-tsking for what strikes me as one of the most natural responses -- a furious anger and desire that the perpetrators pay severely for their most horrific of acts -- and in some corners, an insistence that the truly enlightened, sophisticated response is to find some sort of sympathy for the poor, misguided aspiring mass murderer. Ace spotlights perhaps the most egregious example, a musician named Amanda Palmer writing a poem to one of the bombers. (If you're asking, "who's she?" don't feel bad. The only reason I have heard of her is that she gave a TED talk, about the value of asking people for things.) For what it's worth, even some lefties are repulsed by this, with Gawker declaring it, "The Worst Poem of All Time." Over at Salon, they conclude she's expecting applause for doing something unpopular, as if that ipso facto makes it daring and worthwhile:
Before we go any further, why is it important that I, or anyone else, "envision the perspective of someone whose eyes few of us can ever imagine seeing the world from"? His "perspective" drove him to put a ticking bomb next to an eight year old. [Blankety-blank] him. I'm sorry, when you fill a pressure cooker full of nails, designed to maim and kill, and leave it in the middle of a crowd and walk away, and later shoot a cop in the head from behind him, you've become a monster, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with saying so. I'm very, very comfortable assuming that unfathomable acts are committed by monsters. That's what makes them unfathomable acts to the rest of us. Organizing for Action's Big Talk on Another Gun-Control Vote After the defeat of the Toomey-Manchin compromise, you're hearing a lot of gun-control advocates left in a combination of sputtering disbelief and rage. Midday Monday, Organizing for Action -- formerly Obama for America -- sent out a message that mentioned the "90 percent of Americans support this" statistic twice, concluding, "90 percent of this country is on our side, not theirs. If we all step up, we will be heard. And we will win the next vote." So they think there's going to be another gun vote sometime soon. Say, as we get closer to Election Day 2014, does this vote get easier or harder for Red State Democrats? Do Kay Hagan in North Dakota and Mary Landrieu stay on board? Or do they feel even greater pressure to put daylight between themselves and, say, Mike Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns? Of course, if you want to pass something like Toomey-Manchin, you have to persuade Democratic senators Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Mark Pryor of Arkansas to switch sides and support the proposal. And in the end, the oft-cited "90 percent" figure clearly doesn't matter that much to them. A more interesting question is: How do Montanans, Alaskans, North Dakotans, and Arkansans feel? Judging by the votes of those four, the provisions of the Toomey-Manchin proposal weren't such a slam dunk. Now USA Today offers a number that demonstrates the wording of the question matters a great deal:
Clip and save the big talk from Organizing for Action, by the way. Because after the 2014 Senate primaries are done, when the Democrats' hopes of retaining the Senate hang on Baucus, Begich, and Pryor . . . let's see how important this vote really is to them. Let's see if Organizing for Action really is willing to leave these senators alone because of this issue, when they're neck-and-neck with Republican challengers. Maybe they'll prove me wrong. But I'll bet that as we approach November 2014, Organizing for Action will be sending out a very different message -- about how Baucus, Begich, and Pryor must be reelected for the sake of the president's agenda in the next two years. Speaking of Polling . . . I think we can safely say this is not the result the Huffington Post wanted to see in their most recent survey:
Okay, how many of you checked the level of phosphates in your cleaning product? Okay, wait, how many of you have used a cleaning product lately? Uh-huh, I thought so. Arianna Huffington is very disappointed in you. ADDENDA: Whether you like the Gang of Eight immigration-reform plan or hate it, I hope you'll agree that this is not a topic we ought to rush through the legislative process -- particularly considering that some guy who became a citizen six months ago thanked this country by blowing up the Boston marathon. Even Senator Marco Rubio wants to get a good look at how these guys slipped through our security net and our immigration system's background checks before moving on the proposal. With that in mind, my latest graphic, asking merely . . . let's not rush this, okay?
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NRO Digest — April 23, 2013
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