Saturday Night In Times Square

I'm late to the party on the Times Square bomber, but it's nice to see the left-wing dishrag refer to him as simply a "suburban father"...

He had obtained citizenship through marriage to a woman who was born in Colorado — the authorities say she and their two young children are still in Pakistan, where they believe he was trained in making bombs last year in Waziristan, a tribal area that is a haven for militants.


On Saturday, the authorities said, Mr. Shahzad drove a Nissan Pathfinder packed with explosives and detonators, leaving it in Times Square.


About 7 p.m., as a robot from the bomb squad was being summoned to the S.U.V., Mr. Shahzad called his landlord from the train to Connecticut and said he had lost his keys; in a criminal complaint filed on Tuesday, the authorities said the keys had been locked inside the Pathfinder.


The landlord met him at the apartment that night to let him in. “He looked nervous,” said the landlord, Stanislaw Chomiak, who had rented him a two-bedroom apartment in Bridgeport since Feb. 15. “But I thought, of course he’s nervous, he just lost his keys.”


In nearly a dozen years in this country, Mr. Shahzad had gone to school, held steady jobs, bought and sold real estate, and kept his immigration status in good order, giving no sign to those he interacted with that he had connections to terrorists in Pakistan. Nor was there any indication that he would try to wreak havoc in one of the world’s most crowded places, Times Square.


His neighbors in Connecticut said the things neighbors always say about someone who suddenly turns up in the headlines — he was quiet, he was polite, he went jogging late at night. Like so many others, he lost a house to foreclosure — a real estate broker who helped him buy the house, in Shelton, Conn., in 2004 remembered that Mr. Shahzad did not like President George W. Bush or the Iraq war.

Hell, based on the last point, he could have qualified for the Times editorial board. But give the Times credit -- at least they're not acting like MSNBC, where one of their anchors was actively disappointed that Shahzad turned out not to be a Tea Party member. What's really ironic is that she cites the case of the Hutaree militia in Michigan, just days before the members of said militia were released on bond by the judge. At times, I'm wondering if the mainstream media has finally given up the false premise that they're objective.

Meanwhile, it appears to be more and more clear that Shahzad was indeed trained by the Taliban. Kudos to our guys for capturing him, even if he almost escaped by suddenly evading surveillance and due to a snafu involving the watch list. These investugations aren't perfect, but this one was done rapidly and concluded with the capture of the bad guy without loss of life. That's pretty good. Then again, I might feel better about all this if Janet Napolitano seemed competent, which doesn't appear to be the case. Of course, in this Administration, she probably qualifies as a superstar because she actually pays her taxes.