MANHUNTS END. RIGHT-WING ATTACKS NEVER DO.

I'd really, really just like to be happy that Dhokhar Tsarnaev is in custody. Is was thrilling to follow the end of that manhunt, as the letdown from the afternoon turned into triumph. But we're stuck in a political moment we can't get out of:

Beginning several hours before Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's capture, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) wrote on Twitter that the suspect ought to be placed in military custody.

"If captured, I hope Administration will at least consider holding the Boston suspect as enemy combatant for intelligence gathering purposes," Graham wrote Friday afternoon. "The last thing we may want to do is read Boston suspect Miranda Rights telling him to 'remain silent.'" ...

"NBC reporting Obama admin will treat terrorist as a 'criminal' and not enemy combatant," former State Department official Liz Cheney wrote on Twitter Friday night. "Will Obama allow him to lawyer up?"

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as you probably know, isn't being Mirandized, but that will probably be temporary:

Lawyers have already made one potentially critical decision: he hasn't been read his Miranda rights, at least for now....

But if, for example, Tsarnaev's injuries leave him too incapacitated through the weekend to be questioned, it might not matter that he didn't get mirandized because the judge will read him his rights probably at his bedside on Monday.

Never mind whether Dzhokhar is too incapacitated to talk before he's Mirandized. What if Tamerlan, his dead older brother, was the principal plotter and Dzhokhar literally doesn't have much to tell? What if the brothers had no ties to terrorist organizations and just did the whole thing as a DIY project based on Internet instructions, or what ties existed were solely between Tamerlan and the groups?

The problem is, Dzhokhar might be perfectly willing to talk, before and after getting Mirandized, but he may not know much about how this was all put together. Dave Cullen, who wrote the definitive history of Columbine, reminds us that in that incident Eric Harris "sought out the arms, collected the ammo, researched the big bombs, built all the pipe bombs, drew up the plans and diagrams, conducted the reconnaissance, calculated how to maximize the body count, cooked up batch after batch of failed napalm, and generally devised the plan." Dylan Klebold was very much the lesser partner. This could conceivably be very similar.

And if so -- if Dzhokhar doesn't tell us much because he doesn't know much, or if (because the whole thing was done without terrorist training or contact with terrorist groups) there simply isn't much to tell regarding national security -- and then Dzhokhar is Mirandized, vultures like Liz Cheney and Lindsey Graham are going to howl that the Obama administration is putting us all in danger. That's when we'll really start hearing talk about enemy combatant status and Gitmo and waterboarding.

I don't know if it's going to come to that. What I do know is that the Republicans won't put politics aside, even for a second. They never do.

Oh, and how long do you think it's going top take for someone like Darrell Issa to start grandstanding about the FBI's previous scrutiny of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the fact that no suspicious activity was uncovered?

Remember this: Most Americans think one of the bad guys is dead and the other one is in custody. But Republicans think the real bad guys work for the government.

To Republicans, the bombers aren't the real enemy. Even terrorist plotters who might have helped the bombers aren't the real enemy. The Democratic Party is the real enemy. The Democratic Party is always the real enemy.