An early contestant in the 2008 "Spurious Logic" Awards

A couple days back the news media, before they got distracted by something shiny, was fretting over the latest angry white guy kid case, from right here in South Carolina. Evidently we were going to not only have another school shooting (let's hear it for "easy access to guns"!) but a bomb as well, and from that fact the Feds have decided to charge the kid in question with possession of WMDs:

CHESTERFIELD, South Carolina (AP) -- The acting U.S. attorney for South Carolina says a teenager accused of planning to bomb his high school will face a federal charge of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. The charge carries a possible life sentence.

And where did young Ryan get his material from? Why, TEH EEEEVIL INTERNETS, of course:

Schallenberger was arrested Saturday after his parents called police because their son had ordered 10 pounds of ammonium nitrate, which they retrieved after getting a delivery notice from the postal service, authorities said.

Ammonium nitrate is an explosive commonly used as fertilizer and was employed in the deadly 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Authorities said Schallenberger bought it on eBay.

Well, um, considering he only had 10 pounds as opposed to the thousands of pounds Tim McVeigh used, it's questionable if that really qualifies as a WMD or not. According to the FBI, WMDs are "chemical, biological, and radiological/nuclear materials", so something that would merely cause a big explosion hardly seems to qualify to me. (If I were the defense lawyer, personally, I'd make a point of the imperfect definition of the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" and how it might, or might not, apply in this case.)

ANYWAY - what this all leads to is my subject, one of the blog links from CNN.com's story about the subject. Some being writing something called "The Dan Lee Report" (pretentious, much?) decided that the accusation of WMDs in this case somehow-or-other means that "liberals" should defend this kid, or something:

Not that I feel bad for too bad for this teenager accused of planning to bomb his high school in SC, but I do fully expect that in a twisted act of “fairness”, liberals should be out in droves defending him like they did Saddam Hussein.. I mean after all, he had all the components to assemble a WMD, but since they didn’t find new enough mustard gas/serin filled bombs to satisfy Liberals, they claimed there were no WMD in Iraq, so why doesn’t that standard apply here?

This kid hadn’t even put anything together yet, so by their own logic, shouldn’t they be veraciously defending him too? I’m not counting on it. It seems that only when one of our own citizens makes illegal weapons with the intent of harming others, that the Democrats are willing to call them “WMD.”

Well, call me crackers, but it's not "the Democrats" who're making the accusation, it's the Acting US Attorney for the District of South Carolina, and his Web bio makes no mention of his party affiliation. Furthermore, not only didn't we find the WMDs in Iraq, we also didn't find the stockpiles or assembly facilities necessary for making them. Furthermore, it wasn't just "liberals" who couldn't find the Iraqi WMDs. Furthermore, nobody was "defending Saddam", we were just pointing out how criminally stupid and mendacious the Iraq invasion was, which has proved to be the case to the point where it's not even open to debate anymore. And let's not even get into "Dan"'s - um - creative use of spelling and grammar. (Hint: It's "sarin", not "serin".)

But, hell! I deny thee, "Dan Lee"! Let's treat this case like we did Iraq.

In that spirit, I call for immediate, tough sanctions on South Carolina with restriction of "dual-use" WMD precursor materials such as fertilizer and fuel oil, maybe with the imposition of a "Food For Okra" program later on if things get too oppressive for the people of the state, whom of course we have no argument with. Plans should be drawn up to destabilize the regime in the State House and troops should be massed on the Georgia and North Carolina borders (just in case). Additionally there should be a no-fly area imposed over Chesterfield, with routine bombings of any ground traffic moving in the area just in case they try to sneak their ammonium nitrate stockpiles to Syria Tennessee or something.

I realize this is going to be painful and expensive. I realize even I, as a resident of South Carolina, may get caught up in the chaos of invasion and occupation. But I am willing to meet our liberators with rose petals and cheers, in the hope that one day in a colonial free South Carolina, Presidential candidates will be able to fly in and shop at our charming native marketplaces, backed by only a brigade or two of heavily armed troops, and we can settle down to a peaceful and calm existence with only the occasional massive car bombing to prompt warbloggers to cluck about how "ungrateful" some of us are for our liberty.