"Geez, you people would never make good bomb-throwing anarchists."

It's funny, or perhaps ironic, but the Times Square bomber (just this past week sentenced to life imprisonment) failed to make an effective explosive device because US controls on certain chemicals made it harder to get "the right stuff," and he had to substitute lesser chemicals that did not produce the explosion he hoped for.

So, without the use of onerous profiling and intrusive wiretapping, the legal anti-terrorist methods used actually worked. The result is that the right-whingers are calling for more profiling and wiretapping, and also calling for star-chamber special courts ("military tribunals") instead of the normal criminal courts that convicted and sentenced him. Obviously, the line from reasonable protections to conviction and sentencing isn't inclusive of enough restrictive methods to satisfy the troglodites among our citizenry.

And I thought the right-whingers didn't "do" irony. Imagine my surprise.

Bob