Ross: What the pipe bomber really says about our political rhetoric

It doesn’t take much. Pieces of pipe, wired to explode. That’s all it took.

I wish it wasn’t so easy to spook a whole nation, but it is.

Photos of the bomb and package sent to CNN pic.twitter.com/nBq3ArtChJ

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) October 24, 2018

There are two ways to handle this. You can surf the channels shopping for plausible explanations for why this is worth all the attention. Is it deliberately designed to tip the election? Was the bomber taking his cue from irresponsible political rhetoric. If you try hard enough, you could find the secret connection that confirms the conspiracy you’ve suspected all along.

So that’s one way to handle the story.

Or, you could stick to what we actually know, which is that somebody wrapped up some amateurish bombs that were intercepted before reaching their targets, and were safely removed.

Which is actually reassuring! And boring.

Bringing us to the real question: How do we vaccinate ourselves against the infectious craziness that always seems to happen in the weeks before an election? Or could it be that we secretly crave stuff like this because it gives us a reason to get even angrier at whoever we most enjoy getting angry at?

That’s the problem with all the nasty political rhetoric – not that it might have inspired the bomber, but that it has created two camps of sworn enemies ready to believe the absolute worst of each other.

The bomber is just the match. It’s the rest of us who’ve been busy spreading the oily rags.

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