Worst prediction ever

Two days ago, liberal journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote:

It may be that the Pakistan-based Taliban, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has quietly established a Connecticut franchise while we weren't looking. That's possible. But it seems far more likely to me that the perpetrator of the bungled Times Square bomb plot was either a lone nut job or a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right. Which actually exists in Connecticut, where, it seems, the car's license plates were stolen.

Turns out it was a Pakistani with ties to the Taliban. Boy did you get that prediction wrong. Maybe you should quit your job and let people with better insights into world affairs write editorials. Such as yours truly. My HBD-based prediction from two days ago was dead-on accurate:

Also, because he's not smart enough to build a bomb that works, he was probably also not smart enough to hide his tracks from the massive investigation that's now underway to find him. I predict he will be caught.

* * *

Mayor Bloomberg was guilty of the same left wing reasoning:

Before the Times Square car bomb suspect was arrested, Mayor Bloomberg told Katie Couric last night that he thought the suspect acted alone, "If I had to guess, twenty five cents, this would be exactly that. Homegrown maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something. It could be anything."

Comments

[Wade Nichols]

Robert Dreyfuss was most likely writing what he HOPED and PRAYED the terrorist would turn out to be. Dreyfuss was simply flaunting his liberal peacock feathers.

Jonah Goldberg actually wrote a decent article about the tendency of people to fit the terrorist's image to their political beliefs:

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWM0MmU3NzliZWY0OTE2NjhhMWY3Yjg0YThlMWUzMTY=

[Jaymthegenius]

At least he isn't a stock "forecaster". Stock forecasters may as well be astrologers, "prophets", fortune tellers, or weatherpersons.

[T-Sizzle]

Totally. The guy wanted to believe that. The obvious assumption would have been racial profiling or something. He's trained himself to not go there. He may actually believe it too.

[Trumwill]

One of the more interesting cases was the DC Sniper. We were told over and over again by the left and the media that it was a white, right-wing wacko. The right said it was obviously a middle eastern terrorist and kept calling the media names for being so blinkered and wrong. Turned out that the guy(s) didn't fit too cleanly into either category.

[AllanF]

And the preliminary reports from the security video was that he was a white male in his 40's. I watched a segment of the released video today and it was so crappy it seemed an ink blot test for the viewer more than anything else.

[HS: As far as I know, that was just some guy taking off his shirt who had nothing to do with the incident. Probably his office was cold, and he put on an extra shirt, which he took off when he went outside where it was quite warm.]

[AllanF]

Another thing to watch for is the white balance in the early press photos. Many will remember the infamous Times/Newsweek OJ mug-shot covers. As it has gotten easier to do since then, it has gotten more rampant.

[sabril]

FWIW my guess was 85% that it was a few Muslim taxi driver types, i.e. 2 or 3 Muslims who happened to be living and working in New York but who were not sent here as terrorists and were not part of some organized international conspiracy like Al Qaeda.

I think I was pretty close, except that (1) so far it seems it was 1 guy acting alone; and (2) the guy had a fancier background than your typical Pakistani taxi driver.

[kurt9]

The liberal-left has always wanted to believe that Islamic terrorism is a fictitious creation of the Bush administration. They conveniently forget about the first World Trade Center bombing (in 1993) during Clinton's first administration as well as the failed attempt in the Philippines to put timed detonation bombs on 6 or so airliners departing to the U.S. west coast. This second attempt, in 1995, actually got considerable press attention by the Asian press (I was living in Japan at the time).

[Rain And]

You didn't link to the Dreyfuss article. The whole things a hoot.

http://www.thenation.com/node/34636

[miles]

The Nation has nothing about the attempted bombing on their website today. It will be shoved down the memory hole like the 1)Detroit Nigerian Muslim Airplane bomber,

2)the Denver-area bomber who wanted to bomb NYC subways,

3)John Allen Muhammad,

4)and Nadal Hasan,

5)and the Muslim TV exec in Buffalo that beheaded his wife,

6)and the honor-killing dad in Tampa,

7)and the black muslim who attacked his own fellow troops early in the Iraq war............all of it shoved down the memory hole never to be brought up in polite conversation in lefty-media outlets like the nation again.

[Yawner]

"The Nation has nothing about the attempted bombing on their website today."

If it does not fit the preferred narrative of "white conservatives are the real threat" then it is simply *not news*.

[Black Death]

I couldn't resist this one:

Seems as though these men were not alone in their false suspicions. Their thinking fell right in line with ... the Daily Kos! It conducted a poll on May 3rd asking for readers to assume the identity of the Times Square bomber. Here are the results ...

An al Qaeda terrorist ---4%

An American sympathetic to al Qaeda ---5%

A militia wackjob ---30%

A teapartier ---32%

A religious wackjob ---9%

[tehag]

"It will be shoved down the memory hole like the"

Your list omitted Ahmed Ressam the millennium bomber, and Sirhan Sirhan the Palestinian assassin.

[M]

Just because it happened to be wrong doesn't mean it was an unreasonable guess. Islamic terrorists know how to make bombs that actually work, so that would have been a stupid initial guess. My initial guess was just a random crazy with incoherent motive, or angsty teen. I was wrong, but if the same thing happened tomorrow I'd have the same guesses.

[M]

Wow, 7 anecdotes!

[Breeze]

And chiming in from overseas - as soon as I heard about it I said it must be a muslim. Funnily enough no media outlet has actually stated that it was a muslim.