"He Knew a Lot About Ammunition"

Sniping about which stories the prestige press chooses not to cover is usually a fairly silly pastime; whichever one you single out will surely be trumped by some other story of which you're completely unaware. (Did you know that the U.S. has ended its bizarre military cooperation pact with the fascist government of Uzbekistan?) Still, in a week in which the news was given over entirely to accounts of bomb-packed baby strollers and yet another presidential speech in which George Bush defended his administration's incompetence by speaking the language of liberal interventionism, it's more than passing strange that no one paid much mind when a suicide bomber blew himself up in Oklahoma.

Here are the known facts: Saturday, October 1, Joel Henry Hinrichs III, a mechanical engineering junior at Oklahoma University, died while sitting on a bench 100 yards from the university's stadium, where 84,000 people were watching a football game. He died because a bomb that some accounts had him holding, and some had as attached to his body, exploded.

Terrorism? His father says no, noting that "He took the care to select an open area where there was no one around."

The rest of us might wonder, though.

Hinrichs' bomb contained triacetone triperoxide, the relatively unusual chemical used by rat-faced would-be suicide bomber Richard Reid. The week before he blew up he had tried to buy a large quantity of ammonium nitrate fertilizer from a feed store in Norman, Ok.; the owner refused after Hinrichs offered no explanation as to why he wanted it. And while the president of the Oklahoma University Muslim Student Association says the bomber didn't attend local mosques, eyewitnesses place Hinrichs at the same mosque once attended by Zacarias Moussaoui, the would-be 9/11 hijacker who was left behind.

Which perhaps makes some sense of the unlikely variation one neighbor offered on the usual "he was such a nice guy" quote: "He didn't seem troubled at all? he knew a lot about ammunition and stuff like that."

At the request of the Justice Department, a federal court sealed the warrant that allowed the fuzz to search his apartment. The Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating. All of which sure sounds like news.

But kooks like pro-internment wench Michelle Malkin and WorldNetDaily.com seem to be the only ones outside of Oklahoma who have been covering the story, which is unfortunate, since you'd think a suicide bomber in the Plains would warrant some attention.

This isn't Osama directing the jihadi international. Most likely Hinrichs was a sad, vaguely disaffected psycho who drew inspiration from Islamist terror rather than, say, from the Klan mostly because of the spirit of the times.

But you'd still think this would get more coverage than three wire dispatches in the Washington Post, two wire dispatches and a 150-word notice (written off wire copy) in the National Briefing section of the New York Times, and nothing at all in the LA Times. Sure, an actual suicide bomb isn't as interesting as those conjured out of Mayor Mike's imagination in an effort to paint himself as a strong, purposeful leader-but it probably deserves at least, say, a tenth of the ink.