Hot Air

Why do conservatives want so badly to portray terrorists as stupid and the netroots as paranoid?

From Allahpundit at HotAir:

It’s almost certainly just a coincidence, but this‘ll be good for some primo nutroots conspiracizing tomorrow morning. A nugget within reveals what the plotters might have intended here. I didn’t realize the two cars were so near each other:

One car, a pale green Mercedes, had been left outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Haymarket. A second, a blue Mercedes, was left a few hundred yards away in Cockspur Street, a busy thoroughfare close to Trafalgar Square. Both contained fuel, gas canisters and nails, but both car bombs failed to detonate. Had either device gone off it would have generated a huge fireball and a shock wave spreading over 400 yards in all directions. If, as suspected, one had been primed to detonate before the other, people fleeing the first blast would have been caught directly in the line of fire of second.

Is it simply too much to ask that we acknowledge that the extremists involved in acts like these are incredibly calculating and penultimately committed? That's a combination we should treat with careful respect, not wild ridicule. We will not defeat terror by underestimating terrorists, plain and simple.