"Everything Looks Like A Nail"

Somewhere, in all that's been said the last few days, a Pierce commenter remarked of Boston's lock-down, "'shelter in place' should apply to the media."

Pierce, on the manhunt's "everything... nail"—

It may be Columbine with a thin overlay of politics. It may be Columbine with Jihadist YouTube videos instead of rambling diaries. It may be Columbine extended over a greater geographical area. But, for the moment, it looks like a couple of young people who went completely off the twig and decided to kill a lot of people. I'm wary of speculating that they simply came under the spell of some YouTube mullah. I also am wary of believing the staggering amount of information dandelion fluff floating through the air from within various intelligence communities. (CNN just reported the speculations of a "senior official" in Kyrgyzstan about the passports of the two brothers.) Right now, all I'm willing to say is that a couple of deadly misfits went on a crime spree for reasons, likely, known only to them. Right now, it's not an act of war. Right now, it's a multiple murder.

But it's all too useful: for mass media that wants screaming sound-bites, and for the perpetual motion machine that is right-wing opportunism.

Steve M has focused, during the manhunt and since the capture, on the right's new opportunity to gin up hatred of Muslims.

Via Digby, this bit of historical perspective from Rick Pearlstein. Comparing the 1975 response to the gruesome Christmas bombing at LaGuardia with reaction to incidents now, Digby writes that—

... 9/11 was a spectacular terrorist attack and it's natural that it would inspire terrible fear. It may not have "changed everything" but it did scare people in a very primitive way. But in reality, it was no more an existential threat than that airport bombing was in 75 or this Boston Bombing was this week. These attacks are designed to make us lose our heads. We didn't used to do that. Now we do.

War on Terror: too useful to ever declare victory and go home.

Boston's taking over the news diverted a bit from Congress' brave fight against "emotional bullying" by the likes of Gabby Giffords, to defeat a watered-down gun control measure.

Easing the effect of the sequester on airports has a constituency; too bad the unemployed, school kids, and the elderly in need of meals don't.
Lee Feng's reporting confirms that the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion was a likely and predictable result of deregulation.

In The Nation, Richard Kim contrasts coverage of the West victims with those in Boston, to raise some of the never on the table issues—

... Let's imagine that instead of sending a handful of investigators from the ATF and the Chemical Safety Board to West, Texas, we marshaled every local, state and federal resource available to discover the exact sequence of events that led to the explosion. Let's imagine that the question—Why?—became so urgent that the nation simply could not rest until it had overdetermined the answers. We'd discover that OSHA hadn't inspected the plant in twenty-eight years—did this play a role in the disaster? If it's found that the company that owns the plant, Adair Grain, violated safety regulations, as it had last year at another facility, we might call it criminal negligence and attribute culpability. But would we ascribe ideology? And which ideology would we indict? Deregulation? Austerity? Capitalism? Would we write headlines that say Officials Seek Motive in Texas Fertilizer Explosion? And could we name "profit" as that motive in the same way that we might name, say, "Islam" as the motive for terrorism? Would we arrest the plant's owners, deny them their Miranda rights and seek to try them in an extra-legal tribunal outside the Constitution, as Senator Lindsey Graham has suggested we treat US citizen Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?...

.No, we won't. We won't do any of these things, because even if the West fertilizer plant disaster is ultimately understood as something more than "just an accident," it will still be taken as the presumed cost of living in a modern, industrialized economy.

When it comes to terrorism, we have the opposite response. We launch wars against other countries, denude the Constitution and create massive state bureaucracies for espionage, covert operations and assassinations. Since 9/11, it's become a political imperative that our nation must express zero tolerance for terrorism, even though, like workplace fatalities, terrorism has been with us long before globalization lent it a more exotic and threating provenance.

To the problem of violence, there ought to be a path between callous indifference and total social warfare. And that's why the miserable and absolute failure of gun control legislation in the Senate—just two days after the Boston bombing and on the same day of the West explosion—was especially galling. Like acts of terrorism, the murderous rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School precipitated a national crisis. In the wake of that tragedy, our collective grief took a particular shape, the shape of democracy. The deaths of those school children were linked to the fate of more than 30,000 victims of gun violence each year, and the impulse to act was channeled through our democratic system, where an overwhelming majority of Americans and a majority of the US Senate expressed support for new gun laws, which were nonetheless defeated.