I was going to write this column yesterday, mere hours after a radicalized jihadist Muslim drove a Ford Lightning pickup truck through a semi-crowded Bourbon Street New Year's revelry in New Orleans, killing 15 and injuring 30.

I couldn't do it. For two reasons. First, the information available mere hours after such an event is notoriously unreliable and cannot be sufficient as a base for any real analysis.
There is no credibility left in that agency. It shouldn't be the lead investigative agency on major terrorist events ever again.
And second, I was simply too pissed off to write something useful.
Those of us hailing from the Big Easy are used to tragedies. They're commonplace in New Orleans. There's always a terrible story someone has to tell — the freewheeling lifestyle leads to accidents, bad health outcomes, unhappy family life and other sad results, though few who live here would change much about the soulful life in South Louisiana.
And that doesn't take into account the toll things like hurricanes and the quality of the local leadership will inflict on the people of that area.
We see tragedies. We're experts in tragedy. What happened in the early hours of New Year's Day on Bourbon Street was not a tragedy.
It was an outrage. An atrocity.
The tragedy came later.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an Army veteran, real estate broker, and six-figure Deloitte consultant from Houston who was somehow dead broke and had burned through two marriages on his way to finding jihadist Islam, seems to fit a common pattern of having a life which made absolutely zero sense.
He'd been working as an IT specialist at Deloitte since 2021, making some $120,000 per year, and yet Jabbar was living in a rundown trailer in a lousy part of Houston with goats and chickens skulking about the property. Within walking distance of Jabbar's home was Masjid Bilal, a somewhat notorious mosque which, mere hours following Jabbar's terrorist act, put out a communique to its members directing them to refuse t...