A great smack-down of the Tsarnaev brothers appeared-of all places-in Saturday's Boston Globe. It was in the Metro section, which might explain it. Kevin Cullen is in no mood for any lily-livered liberal sympathy from the why-do-they-hate-us crowd:

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a pretty good boxer, and he fashioned himself a tough guy. He was so tough he was charged with assaulting his girlfriend.

[...]

Get out the violins, because you're about to read and hear all these stories about how poor Tamerlan Tsarnaev's troubles had to do with the repression of the Chechens, and the hard nomadic life ethnic Chechens were forced to endure in the shambolic collapse of the Soviet Union.

Spare me.

Consider, instead, Lingzi Lu, the beautiful, loving Chinese woman killed in an explosion. She, too, emerged from the ruins of communism. She came from China's rust belt, and when she got to America, she ran with it. She loved the different foods, the different cultures, the different people.

Lingzi Lu came here and saw only opportunity. Tamerlan Tsarnaev came here and threw his away.

Lingzi Lu nursed her friends at BU back to health when they were sick.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev nursed grudges, convinced we all owed him something.

Living in a society that respects and encourages diversity, he retreated into a perverse, self-righteous, judgmental view of others who didn't share his extremist views. And in his final act of selfish venality, he enlisted for his nihilistic denouement his own little brother, brainwashing a kid who by all accounts had made the sort of friendships and social connections that he couldn't...

The authorities believe it was Tamerlan, the zealot, who pulled his little and presumably impressionable brother into his orbit of overweening grievance against the very country that gave the Tsarnaev brothers more opportunity than they ever would have had if they had stayed in the troubled, poor country where they were born, Kyrgyzstan, or the troubled, poor country where their ancestors came from, Chechnya.

[...]

I don't want to listen to how innocent people bear some responsibility for creating the twisted minds of the Tsarnaev brothers.

Let us first bury our dead, heal our wounded, tend to our damaged first responders. Then maybe I'll listen to that "what did we do to make them hate us" claptrap. Then maybe I'll go to some soul-searching debate about how our foreign policy is creating too many enemies and too few allies.

But then, maybe I won't.

The whole thing is great. It's so American, and so typical of Boston-a city which habitually votes for Democrats and has too many over-educated liberals, but which also is home to hard working no-nonsense people who don't put up with excuses and whining.