Regarding the arrest of a suspect in the Times Square not-bombing, I’m of the same opinion as Steve M — if that’s the best the Jihadi Islamic Menace (JIM) can do, they aren’t that much of a menace. High five, everybody.

Naturally, the fact that JIM in America is too incompetent to build even a simple fertilizer bomb has not stopped the rightie blogosphere from going into mighty orgasms of JIM hysteria. If you aren’t whipped into a state of high terror, buckaroos, you must not love America. Or something.

Further, righties want to honor the alleged perpetrator by sending him to Gitmo to face a secret military-tribunal type trial, instead of a mundane, pedestrian, inglorious civilian criminal trial. I’m with c u n d gulag — “Now, we try him in a court of law. And, if guilty, sentence him to the appropriate prison. Not Gitmo. No martyr. No hero. Just a criminal.”

They’re also screaming that this arrest somehow signals some kind of incompetence on the part of the Obama Administration. Actually, seems to me things have gone pretty smoothly. Bombing attempt on Saturday, no one hurt, New York shrugs it off, arrest made Monday. System functioning.

For lo these many years, when any of us on the Left pointed out that the Bush Administration had all kinds of screaming neon warnings about an imminent terrorist attack in 2001 and took no steps whatsoever to prevent it, we were told we were crazy. But because the FBI didn’t bother to personally keep surveillance on one of millions of Middle Easterners in the U.S., somehow this is incompetence. Right.

(Somebody should ask these geniuses how high they want their taxes cranked up to pay for all this individual surveillance.)

I also appreciated what Roy Edroso wrote at Village Voice (and not just because he linked to me):

You may remember that right after 9/11 it became trendy for conservatives to gush over New York and Rudy “America’s Mayor” Giuliani. Then, when it became apparent that New Yorkers still weren’t going to vote Republican, they went back to their usual uncomprehending contempt toward the big, bad City (“I get the feeling these New Yorker liberals just don’t understand how 9-11 changed things. It’s like they don’t even remember it”).

But this weekend a car bomb was found, undetonated, in Times Square, and rightbloggers rushed to explain that the non-explosion was, like the crotch-bomber’s non-explosion, all Obama’s fault, and to generally try to make terror work for them, as it did back in those marvelous days of September 2001, by wrapping the city they despise in their oily, insincere hugs.

What really infuriates them about New York is that New Yorkers don’t stay terrorized. It’s a patriot’s duty to be terrorized, you know.

See also James Fallows, “If the TSA Were Running New York.”