Both sides of this contrived debate are wrong.

1: Anyone with half a brain would have immediately deduced that the thing Ahmed Mohamed brought to school was not a bomb. Even from looking at nothing more than a fuzzy picture, you can easily see that there are no components other than electronic ones. The only issue that can’t be readily resolved is whether it was the child’s intent to make something that looked vaguely bomb-like for the purpose of getting attention.

2: This verbose but not demonstrably genius kid didn’t “build” the clock, it was simply the internal parts of a store-bought alarm clock transplanted into a pencil case. Anyone with a Phillips screwdriver can do that. A lot of children his age and younger make things from scratch that are far more sophisticated.

While it’s understandable that someone as busy with administrative tasks as President Obama can’t be expected to know the difference between a prefabricated circuit and a genuine homemade one, you’d think his advisers would have researched the matter a bit further before making the stupid knee-jerk P.R. move of inviting a slightly dishonest middle-school student to Washington for the purpose of appeasing an equally stupid religious special interest.