BREAKING WARNEWS!

You’ve probably heard by now that Al Qaeda just zapped the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. A truck blew up while security was going over it with sniffer dogs. At least the dogs died happy, I suppose. Those sniffer dogs aren’t the furious anti-drug or anti-explosive types like you might think. They get a Milk Bone every time they find cocaine or fertilizer bombs, so the last sound heard by the tired foreigners bedding down at the Marriott last night would have been excited yipping and yapping, “Oh boy, this thing is so big they better give me a kennel-full of Liva Treats!”

The early reports are that these Teamster jihadis were looking for the Prime Minister’s house, where everybody who’s anybody in Pakistan was having a big hands-on feast. But they were “discouraged” by heavy security around the mansion and decided to head for the Marriott instead. It’s that word, “discouraged,” and the notion of settling for second best, that I can’t help thinking about when I try to imagine what these guys chatted about in their funeral shrouds, on their way to deliver more than a ton of ammonium nitrate to the Marriott. They must have tried to make the best of it: “I mean c’mon, Rashid, the Marriott’s good too!” “Oh Hell yes, Tariq, nobody’s dissing Marriott! Great place! Remember when we were casing it last spring and we put on filthy Western-infidel suits to take a few cellphone pix of the entrance, and to look casual we all got ourselves some smoothies over by the poolside cabana? Incredible!” “Oooo, yeah, I forgot–the Banana-Mango Swirl? Paradise!” “And there’ll be lots of good targets there, maybe not as good as the PM but we’ll make it up on the numbers–how many rooms they got?” “Jeez, must be 400 at least. Gotta be a good dozen CEOs staying there. How many CEOs make a PM?”

I bet they were all cheered up by the time the dogs started barking. That’s what makes suicide bombers so funny, whether you admit it or not: because nobody can stop being the way they are, all whiney and conceited and ridiculous, even on the way to vaporize a truck in an oil exec’s luxury suite. The dynamic duo in the truck (it’s usually two guys, but I can’t vouch for that this time) probably spent their last minutes arguing over who gets to hold the deadman switch. That’s life: you try for drama and you get a couple of Islamic Pauly Shores in shrouds in the cab of a Ryder, arguing over left turns all the way to the Marriott.