Catholic Priest
runner,
why so choosey ? why draw attention to the minority ?

You have to admit that, despite the horror and tragedy of the carnage, the Homeland Security Keystone Cops manhunt was vastly entertaining.

Boston on lock-down... Internet and mobile communications shut down... People, stay in your houses or you’ll be shot (and remember, this is a free country) … Choppers, jetfighters swooping up a storm... Skies like the London Blitz on steroids ... Star Wars stormtroopers in their thousands running up and down suburban streets that looked to be straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

They seek him here, they seek him there. But who? One of those white supremacist patriot geeks, of course ... (No. No. They’re one of us.) It’s a Saudi national... (No. No. They’re our official puppets.) It’s a Chechen... (Hang on. Don’t they hate Russians too? Oh … that’s right. They’re Muslims.)

All of this for the most heavily armed nation on earth to apprehend one terrified teenager and another 20-something BMW-driving yuppie who may or may not be a FBI-Chechen double agent (according to the conspiracists, who also gave us lots of grainy CCTV shots of Homeland Security goons hanging around the pre-bomb scene with their appearing and disappearing backpacks) and so that crowds of wholesome all-American teenagers could dance around chanting U-S-A!, U-S-A! …

And of course, neither Obama nor the media seized on the opportunity to demand tougher bomb-control laws – ‘Bombs don’t kill people, it’s people who kill people’ doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it?

Killarney,
Although I agree with the 2n & 3rd paragraph, I think you're descending into unrealistic academic do-gooder kind of ranting on the 4th.
The last paragraph is of course spot-on & applies even more so here. Think for just a fraction of a moment & consider what the world would be like if there were 260 million Australians instead of Americans. Are you scared yet ?

<<Why is damn America more important than the rest of the world to us?>>

Because the government here is not trying to imitate Bangladesh or Africa, not even South America - they try to imitate the USA.

I couldn't care less for the bombing itself, but I watched in horror as the whole city of Boston came under curfew and private homes were invaded and searched time and again by police, at times even taking out the residents handcuffed to the street.

It did happen to me once, here in Australia, that the police prevented me from returning home, because there was a criminal with a gun entrenching himself at one of the neighbours'. Even then, they could warn me but they had no right to stop me if I freely chose to make a dash for my house and risk being shot. I was more worried about the police than about the gunman, so on that occasion, to not be arrested I was forced out for several hours.

So naturally I am concerned about what goes on in the USA, for fear that the government here takes similar attitudes towards ordinary citizens. I have thus nothing to be ashamed of.

I am surprised, and very disappointed, at the anti-American bias shown by most of these comments.
It may be hard for some of you numbskulls to grasp, but the reason that events in America get so much coverage here is that America is our friend. American soldiers have been dying alongside Australian soldiers somewhere in the world for almost my entire life, and I am 75 years old. And yes, they occasionally make mistakes.
We, along with America, are at war with Islam, although most of us have yet to realize it, and, as a result, are currently losing. When they hit us, as in the 9/11 New York attack; the Madrid and London train bombings; the Bali bombings; etc, etc, we naturally sit up and take notice. When Sunnis kill Shiites in Baghdad or Beirut or Damascus, we are quite naturally not as concerned, even though the casualties may be significant.
This fight will eventually come to us. We don't have to do anything to antagonist Islam, it's quite enough just to not be part of the Islamic world. Their holy Koran orders them to kill us or convert us. Islam means "submission", not "peace".