Sometimes a reaction can be worse than an action, even when that action is very, very diabolical. Some would argue that this was the case with 9/11, with the resultant long-term loss of freedom, misguided military ventures, and no serious effort whatsoever to seal a porous back door to America.

The Boston Marathon bombing also may prove to be a case in which reaction surpasses action in damage. After all, what good is a doctor's treatment if his diagnosis and prescription are wrong, if he claims that what's healthy is Hell-sent and portrays poison as palliative? And what good are our diagnoses and prescriptions relating to terrorism if we demonize the realists and sanitize the terrorists? When our physicians will not, or cannot, heal themselves, is the greater danger posed by those who proudly spread the disease in the name of one evil cause or those who offer a faux cure in the name of another?

In the wake of the Boston terror there has been much speculation by leftists in the media -- despite their claim that this is no time for any such thing. Of course, claiming that the aftermath of an evil act is no time for speculation is like saying that the appearance of symptoms is no time for preliminary diagnosis. The truth is only that it's no time for speculation by people who possess the diagnostic skills of a medieval doctor about to bleed a patient before trephining his skull.

And from the left we've heard absurd emanations embodying their deepest hopes and fears. As John Hawkins pointed out, CNN fingered a "right-wing extremist group"; MSNBC's Chris Tingle (or, as some call him, Chris Matthews) opined that "[n]ormally domestic terrorists, people, tend to be on the far right"; and Nicholas Kristof put the onus on Senate Republicans for blocking an ATF director appointment, as if the GOP should rubber-stamp every ideological mutant the Obama administration disgorges from its malevolent maw. And then there is that favored leftist meme: to inveigh and cite McVeigh.

Of course, if you have to reach back almost 20 years to find a "right-wing" domestic terrorist of note (Tim McVeigh), you start to seem a bit like the 19th-century British mothers who, years after Napoleon's death, would warn their children to be good or "Nappy" will get you. And when you ignore that virtually every terrorist act since McVeigh has been committed by Muslim jihadists, and cling to the idea that most domestic terrorists are on the right when this is the precise opposite of the truth -- just consider the Weathermen, the Black Liberation Army, the Earth Liberation Front, the Animal Liberation Front, and Ted Kaczynski -- you don't belong in the news business but in a straitjacket.

If everyone who suffers an attack by a marine animal in a given area was bitten by a shark, it's logical to assume that the next victim you see was also bitten by a shark. This becomes especially obvious if he's missing a leg and the wound evidences relevant bite marks. Of course, anything is possible. The person could have been attacked by a radiation-mutated octopus just as the Boston terror could be the handiwork of a Boy Scout with a merit badge in bomb-making or a tax-perturbed Tea Party pensioner. These possibilities don't generally suggest themselves to individuals outside of asylum walls, however.

The correct and justifiable speculation here is that the Boston bombing is the work of Muslims. I'd say this even if a Saudi national wasn't questioned as a "person of interest"; I'll also say that it was the correct judgment even if, by some bizarre fluke, that interesting person turns out to be a Saudi Christian or Jew or the real perpetrator is a blonde-haired, Norwegian, Aryan supremacist NRA member. This is for the same reason why it's correct to say that a perfectly balanced coin will come up heads 50 percent of the time even after you've gotten six tails in a row. Bizarre possibilities -- and occurrences -- don't cause sane people to lose sight of the laws of probability.
And the Boston bombing is right out of the Islamist playbook. If the bomber were a "right-winger," a government target would almost certainly have been chosen, and the amateur but effective devices used are typical of lone-wolf jihadists who seek to create mayhem and strike terror into people's hearts. As Michael Moore said, "2+2=...." The only problem with Moore is that he offers new-math answers that you learn in government schools.

And it is those answers that are the problem. Muslim terrorists can destroy physical structures and flesh but can't undermine our laws, traditions, and very fabric of society. They can make some history, but they can't unmake all of history through demonic revision. They can disrupt the present, but they can't rob our future. They may even learn to split the atom, but they can never split us as a people.

Only one group can wreak this truly destructive havoc. And if it weren't for them -- the left -- we wouldn't be susceptible to foreign attacks to begin with. On the simplest level, we should ask why we still allow immigration from terrorist-spawning nations 12 years after 9/11. We know why... and who works the why.

So if the left wants to hurl stones, I'm game. I put the onus on you, Chris Matthews. I put it on you, CNN. I put it on you, Nicholas Kristof. And I put the onus on you and all your comrades, Barack Obama. The terrorists can fly planes, but you are the miasma beneath their wings.

So whom should we really fear? Well, I'll let Roman philosopher Cicero answer that question. He explained 2000 years ago:

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

Even a mass murderer.

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