Simply (?) Criminals

I have spent far too much time already watching the information and reporting from Massachusetts. It is endless with ever-playing loops of pictures or video that never change. We see the same faces peering out from the screen of two young men who, in their own demented way decided that a bomb at the finish line of the Boston Marathon would be a statement of some kind of religious fervor.

Sounds like the IRA in Northern Ireland, except this one was senseless with no true reasoning or purpose. (As if the IRA bombings did- at least from a rational standpoint.)

Sounds even like the Weathermen of the late-60s and early 70s who eventually blew themselves up in their brownstone in Greenwich Village when they didn't know what they were doing.

But we have to fill air-time on an endless news cycle. The news programs have to make it sound like they know something or are looking for something new or different. Some exclusive, even if it means asking inane, pointless, irrelevant questions that they know have no answer. But maybe someone will make an equally inane, pointless, or irrelevant comment that they can quote for the next 15 minutes of fame.

These two young men were simply criminals. Nothing more. Anything else was in their own heads. They were international terrorists in their minds only. They were angry, misguided, possibly psychopaths who acted out of their own personal frustrations at something that most of us have no idea about. There is no religious fervor in this. Unless it is the same "religious" fervor that gets a sniper to aim at an abortion doctor. No. That is not religious fervor. That is criminal thinking. That is frontier justice.

The Tsarnaev brothers, all things equal, are wannabe terrorists; mock Timothy McVeighs; cartoon warriors of some movement. In their fantasies and delusions they caused the deaths - killed - four people. This was no attack on the United States. It was no great political statement.

It was the act of criminals. Don't make them more than what they are.