I know we're not supposed to "speculate", but I can't unsee what I see, and I won't pretend not to see it: The possibility of being wrong isn't an excuse to sit around waiting to be given permission to think.
1. Today is the observance of Patriot's Day - an historic day celebrating a Revolutionary War battle.
2. Patriot's Day is a big deal in the right-wing terrorist / militia movement, because of course fascism, white supremacism, and plots to massacre random people and blow up Social Security buildings were what Ben Franklin and Tom Jeff had in mind.
3. The bombings were in Boston.
4. Boston, despite being a liberal town, has enormous symbolic significance to the right-wing terrorist / militia movement.
5. No one has claimed responsibility, which is typical of domestic terrorism.
6. The target was an international event (like the Olympics) rather than a symbol of national pride and power, which is also typical of right-wing domestic terrorism.
These facts don't necessitate a domestic culprit any more than different ones would prove a foreign perpetrator, nor would being domestic require any particular kind of motive. But there's a certain kind of picture that the initial circumstances paint, and...fuck you if you think it's inappropriate to say so despite all the shit that's already happened and continues to happen in this country...whenever I think about it, I get a distinct whiff of tea.
We'll know what kind of scenario the authorities are leaning towards by whether the media keeps promoting paranoia or suddenly starts dialing it back to appease the sort of people suspected of being responsible and their "mainstream" political allies - as they've done repeatedly every single time some radio-fed monster guns down a church, or a judge, or a prosecutor, or a bunch of cops, or their own children. As they did with the millionaire white supremacist who was plotting to detonate a dirty bomb a few years ago, and the Hutaree Christian dominionist militia plotting to blow shit up, and the countless other similar plots that were thankfully thwarted through both diligent police work and sheer luck. We'll know who the culprit(s) is/are suspected of being if the coverage accuses Obama of being "asleep at the switch" or accuses him of "provoking grassroots anger." They're already balancing precariously across both, waiting to see if the Schroedinger Cat of their preferred narrative comes out as hoped-for.
We know who the media wants it to be, and who they're constantly insinuating it is, just as they did after Oklahoma City. They could be right, but as I say, I'm not going to pretend I don't see what I see, or fail to talk about it for fear of being wrong while the smell of tea wafts all around the incident. Nor will I fail to mention it out of some perverse sense of "disaster etiquette" while the entire spread of the media piously averts its gaze from circumstances they would be shouting about from the rooftops if they pointed in the other direction. I will not avert my lying eyes in lieu of official permission to note the circumstances.
6:09 PM PT: As Karl Rover has noted in comments, April 15 is also Tax Day. One more highly suggestive, symbolic circumstance to be piously ignored until given permission to recognize it.
6:29 PM PT: Denise Oliver Velez notes quite a number of additional circumstantial pieces of information: Patriot's Day (which falls on different days of April depending on the year) is closely associated with both the burning of the Waco / Branch-Davidian compound and the Oklahoma City bombing. Further, it's reported that the bombs were crude, which is also indicative of domestic activity rather than trained foreign operatives.
6:57 PM PT: The last mile of the marathon was dedicated to the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown.
7:15 PM PT: I'm getting very sleepy, so it'll be a while before I can further respond.