Now that the second of the two Boston Marathon bombers has been captured …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyw0mWd51dw

… it’s time to evaluate.

That begins with law enforcement and intelligence, from Steve Spingola:

As far as the lock down, call it 20/20 hindsight, but the tactic itself may have actually helped the suspect elude capture, as thousands of eyes remained inside. Ironically, once the “stay sheltered” ban was lifted, a set of eyes observed something suspicious. Plus, this tactic sends a message to other wannabe Jihadists that they can shutter an entire metro area with a few pressure cookers.

Certainly, the boots to the ground teams on the street did an outstanding job. However, I think this case merits a thorough, top-to-bottom policy review. Once again, all the intelligence fusion centers, NSA electronic listening, etc. failed to provide the intelligence needed to prevent the attack. The shoe bomber hopped aboard an airliner undetected; the underwear bomber successfully took a commercial flight, even though he was on the no-fly list (due to his name being misspelled by one letter); while a bombing in Time Square was prevented by a faulty detention device and a vender who had spotted a suspicious SUV. In each of these instances, surveillance—as a method to prevent terror attacks—failed miserably.

So much for sacrificing liberty for security—a doctrine Benjamin Franklin warned against.

Sure, after the fact, video surveillance has proved valuable; although it appears private video footage broke the Boston case open. Moreover, during this investigation Americans learned that suspect #1 traveled overseas for six months, posted strange things on social media, and was red flagged by a foreign government (probably Russia), which asked the FBI to check into his activities. One would have thought suspect #1 would have been one of a hundred individuals fusion center operatives would have kept close tabs on.

So, the question needs to be asked: was the $500 billion our nation has spent since 9/11 to employ over 800,000 people and create a vast electronic intelligence apparatus worth the expense? …

What can the government do to prevent terrorism? Discontinue the surveillance of large swaths of the American populace, 99.999 percent of whom will never commit an act of terror, and, instead, focus our resources on those with a motive.  Think about it: how do the surveillance cameras mounted atop traffic control signals on 124th and Burleigh prevent acts of terrorism? Wasting taxpayer dollars to conduct surveillance of Americans diverts resources from the real problem: extremist groups and foreign nationals overstaying student visas that pose a real threat to this nation’s security.

As far as the media, they continue to report that this was the first terror attack since 9/11, which is simply Obama administration propaganda. Ft. Hood was a terrorist attack. As was the case in Boston, Hassan was radicalized from within and took his orders from afar. Classifying Ft. Hood as “work place violence” is akin to claiming that Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy is an immaculate conception.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza evaluates the media:

The events in Boston over the last four days have riveted the nation — and put journalism, the profession that I love, under the microscope.  I’ve been thinking about what lessons I can learn as a political reporter from everything that has happened over these last 96 hours. …

1. Better safe than sorry. For all of the things that reporters got right this week, the after-action report will focus on what we got wrong.  The reporting that a suspect had been taken into custody on Wednesday became a story of its own, a development that no serious journalist wants to see.

The reality of a news environment driven by Twitter (more on that below), cable television and constantly updating news on the web is that the desire to be first has become all-encompassing. Everyone, of course, still wants to get it right but in the race to be first judgment about being right can get skewed. …

2. Twitter is a reporter’s best friend…until it’s not. I am a big believer in the power of Twitter. I use it daily. I think it has revolutionized journalism (and news consumption generally) in ways we are just now beginning to grapple with and understand. And, as expected, Twitter was the de facto news source for many people — including most journalists not in Boston — this week.

That was a good thing — at times. Twitter helped me understand where the bombs had gone off, sent me to reporters on the ground in Watertown Thursday night and provided images of an empty Boston and the SWAT teams searching for the suspects.

It was a bad thing too. The immediacy of Twitter means that one moment of bad judgment by someone with lots of followers (or even someone without lots of followers) can distort coverage for minutes or hours. …

So, trust but verify.

3. Primary sources matter…: Because of the general dearth of experts on any subject — the Boston bombings included — it’s important to identify the people who really are authoritative sources and give them priority.

So, what the FBI and the Boston police department say (or don’t) matters more than what some random person on Twitter — even one affiliated with a news organization — says or what an anonymous source might tell a reporter on TV. …

4. …and so do good reporters: People who follow me on Twitter know that i have spent much of the week praising NBC’s Pete Williams who has been the star that has emerged from this dismal chain of events.

Pete stood out by reporting only what he KNEW to be true and making clear that there was plenty he didn’t know. Ditto the Post’s Sari Horwitz and Doug Frantz. (One of the bad tendencies of journalists is an unwillingness to acknowledge what we don’t know. The truth is NO ONE expects us to know everything about every topic.)

Good reporters are the ones who take in all of the incoming — from Twitter, from their own sources, from colleagues — and filter out what doesn’t matter or can’t be proven. “The essence of journalism is the process of selection,” Williams noted in a National Journal profile. He couldn’t be more right. Judgment — knowing what is and isn’t news — is the single most important trait distinguishing good reporters from the rest of the pack.

By the way: Never love your job, because your job does not love you.

Speaking of the media, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ biggest waste of space not named Paul Krugman, should learn that sometimes he should stop at his column’s first half-sentence …

Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation …

… instead of proving his own point with several hundred words of irrelevancies, illogic (a carbon tax has exactly what to do with Chechen terrorists?) and plain stupid ideas (see “carbon tax”).

Jonah Goldberg makes infinitely more sense:

… we now live in a climate where there’s a ghoulish appetite to transform every act of terror and murder into a useful plot point in a political narrative. This is a bipartisan phenomenon, and while I think you could make the case that the Left is worse (in fact, I will in just a minute), it’s silly to deny that we don’t do the same thing.

Moreover, given where we are as a country, it is unavoidable. This sort of thing is too seductive. The Left desperately wants every terrorist attack to be conducted by Rush Limbaugh’s biggest fan, so it’s impossible not to cheer when the Left is disappointed. And given the outrageous double standards that the Left — and the elite “responsible” media — use to demonize the Right, the urge to throw it back their face is irresistible. …

The Left likes to claim that conservatives want these terrorist incidents to turn out to be al-Qaeda attacks in order to justify an often-bigoted “war on terror” narrative, which in turn fuels the military-industrial complex, imperialism, and meat-eating, or something like that. And at the margins there is some of that on the right. Some folks are eager, for one reason or another, to see the Muslim world as a monolithic threat, more powerful and sophisticated than it is.

But here’s the thing. Al-Qaeda exists. The Muslim Brotherhood exists. Islamist terrorism exists. We know this because these people keep trying to kill us — often successfully. Moreover, they clarify things by admitting it. They say things like, “Hey, you guys! We the Islamist terrorists are trying to kill you! We will remind you about this every 15 minutes until you are dead, converts, or slaves.”

I’m paraphrasing, but you get the point. These are not literary interpretations or academic exaggerations of the sort that cause people to think that football is a crypto-fascist metaphor of nuclear war. …

Islamic terrorism is not some subtext, discernible with the sort of magic decoder ring that they give out in English departments. It’s the text, found in weekly, if not daily, headlines. So sure, sometimes people on the right might exaggerate the threat from Islamist terrorism, but it is a wholly understandable exaggeration. You can only exaggerate the truth, you cannot exaggerate a lie. An exaggerated lie is simply an even bigger lie. … 

The reason why most Muslim or developing-world terrorists are treated as representative of something larger is that, wait for it, they are representative of something larger. And to the extent white non-Muslim terrorists are usually cast as lone wolves, the reason is: That is what they are.

And, as far as I can tell, those white guys that are part of larger conspiracies, ideologies, and religions are pretty much always associated with them. In fact, there’s far more evidence that lone wolves who don’t have such associations are routinely cast by the media — and certainly by people like [Slate’s David] Sirota — as if they do. Jared Loughner was a deranged isolated individual. That didn’t stop the Left from immediately associating him with the tea parties, Sarah Palin, etc. (By the way, have they found Sarah Palin’s Facebook map of Chechnya yet?) Timothy McVeigh is still treated as a leader of the militia movement, even though he didn’t belong to any militia movement. And President Clinton was perfectly happy to associate mainstream conservatives with McVeigh.

This is an old and truly disgusting game for Democrats. FDR played it relentlessly. Going so far as to claim — in a State of the Union message! — that anyone who wanted to restore the “normalcy” — i.e. peace, prosperity, and liberty — of the 1920s under Republicans was in fact seeking to install the very fascism we were fighting abroad. Lyndon Johnson and the mainstream media did everything but declare Barry Goldwater a Nazi on national television. Oh wait, they pretty much did that too.

In many ways this is a replay of the smug anti-American asininity of the Left during the Cold War. The idea that the Soviet Union was a threat was often treated as a paranoid delusion, while the “real” threat from the domestic American right was a grave danger. Hitler was dead. Germany and Japan were U.S. allies. But Communism, which was killing and enslaving hundreds of millions before our eyes, just wasn’t something to get worked up about — at least not compared with the super-scary John Birch Society.

Proving the maxim about stopped clocks being right once (digital) or twice (analog) a day, the Daily Caller reports:

On HBO’s “Real Time” on Friday night, host Bill Maher entertained CSU-San Bernardino professor Brian Levin, director of the Center for Study of Hate and Extremism, who maintained that despite the events in recent days, religious extremism isn’t only a product of Islam.

But Maher took issue with that claim, calling it “liberal bullshit” and said there was no comparison.

“You know what, yeah, yeah,” Maher said. “You know what — that’s liberal bullshit right there … they’re not as dangerous. I mean there’s only one faith, for example, that kills you or wants to kill you if you draw a bad cartoon of the prophet. There’s only one faith that kills you or wants to kill you if you renounce the faith. An ex-Muslim is a very dangerous thing. Talk to Salman Rushdie after the show about Christian versus Islam. So you know, I’m just saying let’s keep it real.” …

“I am not an Islamophobe,” Maher replied. “I am a truth lover. All religious are not alike. As many people have pointed out — ‘The Book of Mormon,’ did you see the show? … OK, can you imagine if they did ‘The Book of Islam?’ Could they do that? There’s only one religion that threatens violence and carries it out for things like that. Could they do “The Book of Islam” on Broadway? …

“Now, obviously, most Muslim people are not terrorists. But ask most Muslim people in the world, if you insult the prophet, do you have what’s coming to you? It’s more than just a fringe element.”

Slate reports:

Then, shortly after 11:30 this morning, Ruslan Tsarni, an uncle of the two suspects, stepped out of his house in Maryland and delivered an extraordinary message about character, shame, and collective responsibility. …

Tsarni said he was coming out to express condolences to the families of the victims in Boston. He spoke with anguish and specificity about each of the dead. He had nothing to do with the bombings, yet he felt an awful connection to them. He couldn’t imagine, he said, that “the children of my brother would be associated with them.”

Association is a hard thing. The suspects are Tsarni’s nephews. He’s related to them, but he’s also separate from them. “We have not been in touch with that family for a number of years,” he said. …