Now all that said, it’s kind of nuts, isn’t it, that we have the general in charge of an ongoing war commenting on some guy in Florida being a jerk. Even nuttier is that he might well be right that this episode will endanger the lives of Americans soldiers. But that really raises deeper issues about Afghan society and the wisdom and nature of America’s engagement with it. The essence of a digital, globalized world with billions of inhabitants is that there’s always going to be some jerk somewhere doing something ridiculous. “Guy in Florida deliberately trying to antagonize Muslims” can’t become a global news story every time it happens.

Yglesias takes the Koran burning to a different place than I’d seen anyone take it before, and it’s an interesting point.

If any idiot can captivate national attention by threatening to burn the Koran, then we’re going to see a lot of idiots start to do this. Whether any of them actually end up doing it or not, it’s still not going to end well.