Threatening to make the water wetter.

So, while I was busy yesterday, I kept the browser closed and seem to have missed a news cycle. Apparently there are allegations that a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan failed his sanity check and went off the reservation and shot up a bunch of sleeping Afghanis?

The media seem ghoulishly ecstatic, since the guy lived up to every J-school grad Manhattanite's mental image of your typical member of the armed forces, but it's the reaction of the Taliban that is puzzling me most. They are vowing revenge!

I'm not quite sure how that works out. Are they going to set off suicide bombs and conduct some rocket and mortar attacks? Is that what they're going to do? Because I thought that's what they were doing already.

I guess they could, like, do like a radio DJ and dedicate the next hit or something but, also like the radio DJ, they were going to play a tune anyway, although I suppose it's the thought that counts.

As an aside, calls for the alleged perpetrator's head on a plate (and right now!) demonstrate the underlying utter futility of the attempt to unleash the inner voter's-registration-card-havin', HOA-dues-payin', Best-Buy-shoppin' American that Washington seems to think lurks in the heart of every Afghani hilljack: Ten years we've been bombing democracy into 'em and you might as well try and explain "Due Process of Law" to a tree stump as to your average Pashtun-in-the-street.