Who Is The Bigger Idiot...

...Norman Osborn or the American people (and the media, too)?

I mean, you're tempted to say the American people...at least those of Marvel-616. I mean, in Siege, they're being given the exact same scenario as Civil War, but apparently reaching the opposite conclusion.

In Civil War, as you'll recall, a group of heroes recklessly attack some villains in Stamford, things blow up, and 600 people died. And the public blamed the heroes, not the villains, and the Registration Act passed, etc, etc.

And now in Siege, a group of heroes recklessly attack a putative villain, things blow up, and tens of thousands of people die. And this time, despite the much higher casualty count, we're supposed to believe the public reacts in exactly the opposite manner, blaming those attacked rather than the attackers.

Then again, this is the same American public who saw Norman Osborn just happen to be the one who made the killshot on the Queen Skrull and decide to make him all-powerful, which is akin to people seeing Ted Bundy put a bullet in Bin-Laden's head and electing him Pope of Chilitown, so who knows.

(By the way, I would have said spoiler alert, but since Marvel has been printing these pages from Siege as a "preview" for over a month now, there's nothing to spoil. Special note to Marvel: maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't print the only interesting pages from the story as a preview, leaving the rest of the issue to be a raging anti-climax and borefest. I'm just sayin'...)

So yeah, the American people of 616 are dumbasses.

But Norman Osborn...he's supposed to be a genius, right? Then how does something like this happen?

He and Loki are going to send to U-Foes to beat up on Volstagg, to create a pretense to justify an invasion of Asgard.

Now, let's look at the reasoning used...

You can't go with the Avengers or Thunderbolts? Why not? Well, it must mean a) this will be public, and b) you need plausible deniability. Osborn can't be seen as being behind the attack...

EXCEPT...the U-Foes are not some unknown mystery men. They're the official Initiative team of North Carolina!!

How do we know this?

Because Osborn himself held a televised press event introducing them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (In Avengers: Initiative #26, to be precise).

So there's no way he can claim that he has no idea who attacked Volstagg, no connection to them--he pimped them on live TV as his hand-picked "champions!"

Man, if I were cynical, I'd think that Bendis was (once again) not even bothering to care in the least what his fellow Marvel writers were doing...

And you can hardly argue that they weren't seen...they were standing right on top of the Jumbotron at Soldier Field!!

Do you know how many network TV cameras are at an NFL game? How many cell phone cameras must have transmitted an image of them before the big boom? And the cops an civilians where the fight started saw them, too.

OK, OK, maybe you can argue that Loki double-crossed Osborn, and picked the U-Foes specifically to foil his plans. But if that's true--and there's no evidence that it is--than why does Osborn compound the problem by taking the U-Foes to beat up Thor??

They're there--in his company--seen on live national television!! The same guys who just publicly blew up Soldier Field, are hanging around with Citizen Osborn and beating up known hero Thor.

Despite what Osborn said earlier about not wanting to be connected to this.

Norman Osborn--the stupidest man alive.

I mean, it couldn't just be terrible comic book writing, could it?