Imagine my surprise when British news magazine The Week announced that I was writing for the WaPo:
Who they are referring to is actually the Washington Post’s Charles Lane, who indeed is not particularly buying the ‘distraught over his foreclosure’ defense being made on Faisal Shahzad’s behalf. But if it makes The Week feel any better, I was as skeptical about this particular defense as Charles was…
Moe Lane
(ahem)
Moe Lane. Of RedState (and MoeLane.com).
After being raked over the coals by his own comments section for taking seriously his – girlfriend’s? I’m uncertain – fairly pointless observation that suspected traitor and terrorist Faisal Shahzad’s house was foreclosed, Ezra Klein huffed in a follow-up:
I thought I said pretty explicitly that speculating about why a terrorist commits a terrorist act is a mug’s game…
What he actually said was:
That said, you of course don’t want to speculate on why someone “really” did something. The hearts of men are opaque, and motives are complex.
Ah, ‘complexity.’ A favorite refuge of the intellectual who has realized, deep in his oh-so-opaque heart, that he once had to make a moral choice – and that he chose poorly.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
Via Instapundit, via Dan Riehl, your shocker of the day:
BRIDGEPORT, Conn. (AP) — A real estate broker says the Times Square bombing suspect told him years ago he disliked President George W. Bush and the Iraq war.
Igor Djuric (JOOR-itch) represented Faisal Shahzad (FY’-sul shah-ZAHD’) when he was buying a home in 2004. Djuric says he could not remember the exact words but said Shahzad made clear he didn’t like Bush or his policy in Iraq. He says the comments were not hateful, but he was surprised to hear them because they hardly knew each other.
Now, clearly your standard antiwar BDS sufferers do not decide to take things to the next level and decide to go commit acts of treason against the USA. The percentage is almost infinitely small, in fact. But it’s also looking fairly clear by now that Shahzad was one of those fragments of a splinter of a sliver percentage that would snap – or he was a sleeper and was planning to do it all along. Either way, why did he wait so long? …oh. Right. He was possessed of a bowel-liquefying fear of what the previous administration would do to him and his fellow-terrorists if Shahzad tried anything. This is an attitude that the current administration should be doing more to foster among our enemies.
And by ‘more’ I mean ‘at all.’
Moe Lane
The man’s a naturalized citizen who was arrested on American soil. Glenn Beck is completely correct: we have to Mirandize suspected traitors.
