Suicide is painless...

There's an old joke among psychiatrists that goes

It's not paranoia when they're really out to get you.

But one endeavors, for all that, not to be paranoid.

And in this spirit one's heart goes out to David Boren, former Oklahoma Democratic senator and former chairman of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, now the President of the University of Oklahoma, as he tries not to jump to any conclusions about any Sooners who might strap volatile explosives like triacetone triperoxide (TATP), called "Mother of Satan" on Islamist websites, to their bodies and self-detonate, or perhaps accidentally detonate, after being turned away from a crowded football stadium because they did not want their backpacks inspected by security and they had converted to Islam and had recently tried to purchase ammonium nitrate but could not explain to the vendor why they wanted one of the key ingredients of the kind of bomb that had destroyed the Murrah Building and...

Well, you get the idea.

It is important not to jump to conclusions. One wishes not to appear to be hysterical, and all.

And this principle applies a fortiori to our assessment of a great American newspaper when it buries the story of an exquisitely precise and articulate statement on the war we are fighting, from our famously tongue-tied and inarticulate President, in two pages of carping about his failures to properly prosecute that war, on the same day that subways in the very city where that paper's reporters write are under heightened terror alert, and during the week immediately following what may have been the first attempted Palestinian-style "suicide bombing" in the United States.

One does not want to blow things out of proportion. One wishes to remain cool.

Just keep your focus on the president, and his failures.

That could never be a preparation for a kind of suicide.