JOHN CARNEY NOTES that John Muhammad was registering his killing machine on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Hmm, he changed his name right after the attacks, too. But remember, he’s just a lone nut. No connection to Islamic terror here.

Andrew Sullivan notes:

But we do know the following: he was a convert to Islam, he changed his name recently, he harbored “strong anti-American feelings and had publicly praised the terrorist attacks of September 11,” he actively supported the Nation of Islam, and the New Jersey plates for the car were bought on the first anniversary of September 11, immediately after which a bomb scare emptied the DMV building. Call me crazy, but isn’t that a striking series of coincidences? To read the papers this morning is like looking at several massive dots with no-one daring to connect them.

Indeed. Yeah, sure, the guy’s got a history of violence and lunacy, too — but so do most terrorists. They’re not very admirable people. As Sullivan concludes:

So we have a Muslim convert, sympathetic to the murderers of 9/11, terrorizing the nation’s capital, and coming close to shutting its daily life down. I don’t see that it matters whether he was formally a member of al Qaeda or some other group. In fact, it’s more disturbing if he is not.

Maybe that’s why a lot of people don’t want to think about it. Sullivan raises some other questions worth thinking about, too.