The great hope for a “violent teabaggers” news cycle fizzled out, so they’re going to have to go to Plan B. Good enough?

Igor Djuric, a broker who showed Mr. Shahzad the 1,356-square-foot home he eventually bought, said he remembered that Mr. Shahzad was quiet about himself, but was openly critical of President Bush in the aftermath of the Iraq war.

“I didn’t take it for anything, since a lot of people didn’t like Bush,” Mr. Djuric said, “but he was a little bit strong about expressing it.”

The only thing strange about Mr. Shahzad that next-door neighbor Brenda Thurman could remember was his habit of going jogging at night wearing all black. He told her he didn’t like the sunlight, she said.

That’s buried in a lo-o-ong profile of the bomber compiled by the Journal, but the AP’s already helpfully split the nugget about Bush off into its own little news story for easy linkin’. Truth be told, I think the media’s actually going to throw us a curveball on this. The Bush/Iraq scapegoat is old and busted, for the simple reason that Iraq’s been off the political radar screen for so long. Lefties are about as likely to protest the ongoing occupation there these days as they are the fact that Gitmo’s still open, which is to say, basically never. The new hotness is withdrawal from Afghanistan; they’re still peeved at The One for doubling down on that, so if Shahzad’s smart enough to cough up a rhetorical hairball about how he was driven to this by, say, the coming “aggression” against Kandahar, he’ll be in media hog heaven before he knows it.

And if he’s not smart enough, they can always segue into the easy-peasy “beware of the bigoted American backlash against Muslims” narrative. Click the image to watch RCP’s compilation of that fallback narrative coming together this afternoon. Exit quotation via Andrew Breitbart: “OHMYGOD! Thwarted Times Square bomber was anti-George W. Bush! Be on terror alert for all Bush-Bashers!”