Patriots Day 2013 in Boston

It's impossible to say right now exactly what happened in Boston with those horrific explosions during the running of the Boston Marathon today (and made especially difficult by what seems to be to be pretty weak breaking-news performance by the always self-regarding Boston media -- though none remotely as inept as the sad-sack New York Post, which has had howlingly bad reporting all day).

But consider:

Today is Patriots Day, which is officially celebrated on the third Monday in April and which nominally commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Patriots Day is especially near and dear to the paranoid right-wing militia movement in the U.S., elements of which celebrate the day on April 19. The Branch Davidian Waco debacle by the federal government -- long a rallying point for the right-wing paranoids -- occurred on a Patriots Day in 1993. Two years later, on a Patriots Day 1995, the right-wing lunatic Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and injuring 800, in the worst homegrown terrorist incident in  U.S. history.

And today, which is also federal income tax filing day, is Patriots Day in Boston ...


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