Responses to the London atrocity

As I expected, right wingers are simply reveling in the attack. Brit Hume said his first thought was that he could make money on the London stock market by buying stock futures, as related here. Other Fox commentators apparently were crowing about its being politically advantageous in terms of their getting to push their favored issues. The Wall Street Journal editorial today crows about how this shows how right we are to keep on torturing those poor innocents picked up off the street who are mixed up with the bad guys at Guantanamo. WSJ Deputy Editor Daniel Henninger treats it as an argument for confirming John Bolton (!!). I can't resist quoting this paragraph from his piece because it is so surreal:

"If the U.S. Senate wanted to send a signal of resolve and seriousness to whoever bombed London, Democrats would join with Republicans their first day back to dispatch proven anti-terror warrior John Bolton straight to the U.N. They won't. They'll keep playing political fiddles while London burns."

Exactly how is this supposed to help? I have an even better idea. Americans must show resolve by, each and every one of them, mailing me $1,000 checks, made out to cash, please. If you don't do this, dear reader, you are basically just encouraging the terrorists. You are showing that you are weak.

Maybe tomorrow the WSJ will say that, in light of the terror attack, we must immediately pass Bush's Social Security plan.

On the left, I get the sense that people, while genuinely outraged as all of us (if human) must be, are also anxous to show how outraged they are, because they know the Karl Rove types will be waiting to smear them if they are not visibly vociferous enough.

This is the sick climate we live in today. One side eager to exploit the terror attacks as an excuse to push all of their pet projects that have nothing to do with fighting terrorism. The other side desperate to show that they are angry enough.

Is it utterly out of the realm of possibility that, if al Qaeda doesn't cooperate by staging an attack in the U.S., Karl Rove and his minions will plan their own, Reichstag-fire style? I'd like to think they wouldn't. But if someone confidentially proposed this to Rove, I can't imagine any objection that he could possibly have to it, other than feasibility. This is, after all, a man who (I have read) spread what he knew were false rumors that an Alabama judge candidate was a child molester. Only, the upside of taking so large a risk as in the Reichstag fire scenario would have to be considerable.