Rush to blame after New Orleans attack serves terrorists' aims

     For many years, I dismissed the idea of going out on New Year's Eve as "amateur's night." Packed restaurants, overwhelmed staff, slashed menus, jacked-up prices.

     Who needs it? There are 364 other nights to eat in restaurants; Dec. 31 is for staying home, eating little hot dogs wrapped in dough and watching bad local television.
     But Tuesday night we were lured into the city by old friends and — mirabile dictu — the night could not have gone smoother. Metra was on time and free. We caught the 156 bus at Union Station, entirely empty.
     "We're like rock and roll musicians!" my wife enthused, as our private bus lumbered into the Loop. We headed to Zanies on Wells Street. There we saw an impish young cast member from Saturday Night Live, Michael Longfellow. We grabbed a cab over to Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba, where the mood was festive, the food hot, the service good.
     Catching the 1:15 home — the trains held, thoughtfully, by Metra — we decided we might have underestimated this going out business.
     Nobody murdered us — that was fortunate, though I didn't think to be grateful when I finally got to bed about 3 a.m., a few minutes before Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove an F-150 pickup truck into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people and giving the American public a taste of what 2025 is going to be like.
     Not the violence, necessarily — we already have plenty of that, living in a country where our fellow citizens routinely decide to throw away the lives of innocent bystanders, plus their own, based on mental illness or political extremism — and those two are harder and harder to tell apart.
     But the reaction to the violence.
     "Shut the border down!!!" U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., the MAGA stalwart, demanded on X, sounding a common theme, after Fox News reported Jabbar had crossed into the country from Mexico two days earlier.
     But Fox was wrong. Jabbar hadn't come from Mexico — the truck had. Apparently Jabbar rented it from Turo, one of those Uber-like companies that offer vehicles owned by private individuals.
     Jabbar was a U.S. Army vet born in Beaumont, Texas. A fact hard to grasp by those who apparently can't see past his name.
     “When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” President-elect Donald Trump wrote on X, hours after the news broke.
     The notable part of that sentence is Trump giving the impression he cares whether something supporting his prejudices is true. Remember, he's the guy who imagined crowds of American Muslims cheering as the World Trade Center towers fell on 9/11. That it never happened didn't matter to him. He repeated his calumny rather than renounce it.

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