Am I missing something?

Times Square is the crossroad of the world. Virtually every major financial firm is located there. Every communications company is there. Once a year, on New Year's Eve, over a billion people tune in to see what's happening there. Times Square is home to a police station, an army recruiting station, and literally thousands of closed-circuit cameras.

It puzzles me, then, that on Saturday somebody tries to bomb the place, and the only camera that captures the action is the one they use to keep people from skipping out on their checks at Applebee's.

Here's the official, police-released photo of the suspect in the attempted Times Square bombing.


Got that? It's a balding guy with luggage, in jeans and white tennis shoes. Police are currently rounding up EVERY MALE TOURIST IN THE CITY. Where are the details? They won't need a sketch artist to draw a picture of this dude: they can do it in Lego.

For years the city has been bragging about how constant surveillance via closed-circuit camera ensures our safety, and liberals have been screaming that it's an invasion of privacy. Now we discover they're like Russia during the Cold War. They were always saying stuff like, "Hey, we got bombs! We got millions of bombs we're going to shoot at you, and they're chemical and biological and nuclear!" And later we find out it's a total lie, and their "bombs" are really Thermos' full of old cabbage attached to giant rubber bands.

So, once again we ask: can we believe anything government says? Didn't they just announce they were making cameras that could see through our clothes? Maybe, just maybe, before they do that, they should buy cameras whose resolution is better than a Bingo board, that don't prompt cops to send out APBs for blurry hunchbacks who are possibly tap-dancing. My Hello Kitty camera takes better pictures than this, and it uses dried pink squid instead of film.