People get killed in war, often (if not most of the time), innocent people. There are mistakes, friendly fire, accidents, and there is collateral damage. Industrial facilities get bombed for military reasons, even if the workers who toil there suffer needlessly. Terrorists are taken out at crowded weddings and mosques, tough break. Whole cities were vaporized in an attempt to intimidate or remove a worker population resource, or to make a political point or send a veiled diplomatic message..

It can even be argued that the 9/11 attacks were military in nature, as they were aimed at the concentrated command and control centers of the "enemy economy" and the defense establishment, and were designed to provoke intrusive and expensive security measures on our part.

Acts of pure terror like Boston are very different. They are NOT designed to reduce the ability of the American economy to conduct combat operations. They are designed specifically to terrorize, to intimidate, to humiliate innocent people who have nothing to do with the ideology of any of the combatants. This is personal. And if they don't take credit for the action, it can't even be passed off as propaganda-driven. I think there is another motivation here altogether, this is Unabomber stuff.

I suspect this is an act of domestic terrorism, not foreign. I have absolutely no proof, or even any logical reason to believe this. I may be proven wrong by the facts, if and when they eventually surface. But I have a strange feeling about this, and I've learned to trust my intuition on this kind of thing.

This is an ideological act. Someone hates what this particular sporting event represented to us as a people, or what they thought it represented to us, and they are out to hurt us, to punish us, to show us how wrong we are--about something.

We'll talk about this tomorrow. By the sea, where there is nobody listening.