Other than that intergenerational wrinkle, the perpetrator (about whom not much was known when Hugh and I spoke) was a familiar figure: a young man with a university degree in engineering, living in a nice middle-class residence in a nice middle-class neighborhood.

To Marie Harf and her colleagues in the Administration, he's obviously a victim of economic deprivation whose urge to blow up America would be mitigated by a decent economic-stimulus package. In fact, the poverty is all on our side: a poverty of imagination, the inability of Marie Harf and others to understand that not everyone thinks like you do. And until we respect our enemy sufficiently to stop assuming he's just Marie Harf with a beard and a scimitar, we will keep losing.

In a further jest on posterity, and a reminder that no good deed goes unpunished, the perpetrator was born in Kuwait in 1990, the year Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied the country ...prompting the first President Bush to send American troops, kick him out and liberate the Abdulazeez family's native land. If you expected them to be grateful for the sacrifice of American blood and treasure, well, that's part of that Marie Harf poverty of imagination, too.