Four days ago, an amateur car bomb failed to go off in New York City's Times Square. A T-shirt vendor noticed smoke coming out of an awkwardly parked Nissan Pathfinder and alerted a nearby police officer. The authorities responded swiftly, evacuating the area and defusing the bomb.
Reactions have been oddly muted, nowhere near the frenzy after the underwear bomber Omar Abdulmutallab failed to blow up a plane above Detroit. My rationale is that the difference in reaction is due to the difference in terrorist methods. There is so much security around airplanes that the fact that Abdulmutallab got as far as he did represents a failure somewhere in the system. But there seems to be no good way to stop someone from parking a car bomb in Times Square. In this case, the system worked as well as it could.
Meanwhile, Adam Serwer at Tapped had been pushing the line that conservatives have been quiet because the suspect at the time was "a middle-aged white guy" instead of a radical Muslim. But now that a Pakistani-American has been arrested and has reportedly confessed, Republicans are still fairly silent.
Still, even though I'm not quite as cynical as Serwer--"If the attack was carried out by Muslim extremists, the conservative response will be that this would never have happened if Obama were still torturing people. If it turns out to be a domestic right-wing extremist, well, it'll be a tragic but understandable response to government tyranny."--I have to admit he has a point. Would Scott Brown have said, "No one likes paying taxes obviously," if a Muslim had flown a plane into a building with IRS offices instead of Andrew Joseph Stack III?
Also, Andrew Sullivan rounds up more reactions, and Megan McArdle opines on why terrorist attacks are so infrequent.
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