timessquareFor those ninnies who think New York City is not brave enough, strong enough, or organized enough to manage a competent security arrangement around the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial, I offer you this:

New Year’s Eve in Times Square, only one week after the underwear bomber (around the FDL water cooler we now call him Fruit of the Loom bomber) scared the poop out my Congressman Pete King, the rest of metro New York went on with life.

NYTimes is reporting that despite cold rain and heightened security, a million people went out and partied in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.  Yo,  Petes King and Hoekstra, are you paying attention? A million people DEFIED AL QAEDA and went ahead with life as planned.

One of the ways we beat Al Q is by ending national policies that cast us as “ugly Americans” and winning the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. The other way we win? If we stop giving Al Q mad props every time they try to scare us. You see terrorism doesn’t work if nobody is afraid of you anymore.

Which is why it’s such a good idea to try KSM in NYC. Treat him like what he is, a common criminal. Not a great boogeyman, not an arch criminal, not a martyr, just a guy who could not make a success in life living within the social contract and resorted to life on the wrong side of the law.

Or in other terms, a failure.

Really, you guys have got to give up the Cheneyite notion of “exceptionalism”. Cheney uses the idea that the US is exceptional to try to justify the destruction of all the best features of the US — like separation of powers, adherence to the rule of law, belief in civil rights – that might give our nation a claim to being exceptional.

Cheney the draft dodging coward also spread the false notion that Al Q is somehow exceptional, different from all the other ragtag groups of disaffected malcontents who cannot hack it in civil society – the loners, the guys who don’t have friends and can’t get a date, the guys who twist beautiful religious ideas into something dark and unholy, the fuckups in life who need to take revenge for their own failures by trying to literally blow up and destroy regular folk solely to punish them for leading normal, happy productive lives – are somehow elevated into comic book arch villains that no regular law enforcement effort could possibly deal with. Got the Joker? We need Batman!

There are no special criminals, there are only people who break the law and people who don’t; people who keep the social contract and people who won’t.

Al Q is not exceptional. They are no different than any other international organized crime syndicate. Fortunately, we “get” that here in NY, even if one of our Congressmen does not. Thank you to the revelers who flooded Times Square on New Year’s Eve, proving once again that New Yorkers know better than anybody else how to deal with criminals who try to scare the planet with large scale acts of terrorism, treat them like what they are, pathetic losers who could not hack it in the real world, and against whom, the NYPD and FBI are the most effective tools for keeping us safe; not pre-emptive war.