The Obama and McCain camps are having a bit of back-and-forth over terrorism, national security, etc. The point of conflict seems to be Obama's praise for the capture, prosecution, and incarceration of the 1993 World Trade Center attackers.
In the ABC interview, Obama said the perpetrators of the 1993 bombing are proof that the existing justice system can handle terrorism cases. "They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated," he said. "And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, 'Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.'"
In perhaps record time for a general election campaign, a McCain advisor, Randy Scheunemann, shot back that Obama was advocating "a policy of delusion," and that Obama has the "perfect manifestation of a September 10 mind-set."
A September 10 mind-set? Oh really?
You mean the kind of mind-set that puts terrorism efforts on the back burner, and focuses instead on Reagan/Poppy retread policies like missile defense? The kind of mind-set that caused the "Anti-terrorism Czar" to quit in disgust? The kind of mind-set that would lead the Connecticut Cowboy to receive a memo on August 6, 2001 about Bin Laden being determined to strike the U.S., but not see fit to cut short his Longest Vacation from Prezidentin' Ever? The kind of mind-set that prompted McCain foreign policy advisor and PNAC goon Robert Kagan to pen a Washington Post editorial on May 9, 2001, taking Richard Holbrooke to task for --ohhh, this is rich-- criticizing Bush's love of missile defense and stating that Osama bin Laden is a bigger threat:
Nobody knows better how to push European buttons. First [Richard Holbrooke] pricks European sensitivities about American bullying. Then he suggests that European leaders suffer from a testosterone shortage. Finally, he plays to their worst fears: that [Bush] is delusional. Bush's passion for missile defense, Holbrooke told the German newspaper, is "almost a religious matter." Bush sees threats everywhere, but there are no threats. "We have to ask ourselves," Holbrooke exhorted the Europeans, "in what way are we really threatened." Osama bin Laden, he noted, has no missiles. Of course the [Bill Clinton] administration of which Holbrooke was a part had no difficulty identifying potential missile threats other than bin Laden. Otherwise why was Clinton building a missile defense system at all? But that was then and this is now. Now Holbrooke takes the French view and doesn't mind saying that the Americans are nuts.
Is that the "September 10 mind-set" to which you are referring, Mr. Scheumann?
Under the assumption that an administration's focus on a particular topic can be roughly measured by resulting media reports, I poked around a little bit to try and quantify the Republicans' September 10 mind-set. I did searches for bush "missile defense" and bush "bin laden" on both the Washington Post's site and Google News, for the time period between January 2001 and September 10, 2001. The WaPo search started January 01, and the Google News search started January 21. I don't think that will make much difference, and in fact re-ran the WaPo bush "bin laden" search with a start date of January 21, 2001, and got the same results as with the January 1, 2001 start date.
Since I'm officially blogging about a WaPo story, we'll start with those results.
WaPo search for Bush and missile defense: 419 hits
WaPo search for Bush and bin laden: 8 hits
I would like to point out that of the measly eight hits for bush "bin laden", #1 and #3 actually reference Clinton bombing the Sudanese chemical factory, and #2 is the aforementioned editorial by Robert Kagan. So we might get by with giving him a "5" for this.
Now, on to Google News. I took screenshots of the "timeline view" of the results, which I think tell the story quite well. The yellow areas represent the number of hits, broken down by month, within the selected search dates. The grey areas are outside the search date. Since so much of "September 2001" happened after 9/11, you'll note that that month for bush "bin laden" has a deceptively high bar.
Google News search for Bush and missile defense: 11,200 hits
Google News search for Bush and bin laden: 782 hits
Whatever means Google uses to determine the publication date of a news article quite frankly sucks, because the "bin laden" results are peppered with articles published well after September 10, 2001 that reference a date that falls within the searched span (e.g., August 6, 2001, the date Bush received the infamous PDB, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in United States"). So likely the results for both of the Google News searches are artificially high.
Few things piss me off more than assclown Republicans tossing out the "September 10 mind-set" smear as they try to beat down their opponents with the fear cudgel. It only makes it worse when their opponents are proposing, or in this case lauding, sensible and effective counter-terrorism measures. The "September 10 mind-set" line tries to convince us that The Republican Way is the only right way to fight Terra, and never you mind all the evidence to the contrary.
It also tries to cloud our memories of the Bush administration's failures. By casting the "September 10" aspersions at their opponents and painting "the other guys" as the naive terrorist enablers, they are creating a false dichotomy that makes the mind want to believe --as far too many minds in this country do-- that Republicans weren't the ones that were the terrorist enablers prior to 9/11. Unfortunately for them, reality and recorded history seem to once again have an anti-Republican bias.
So Obama is spot on when he lambasts these jerks that they don't have the authority to lecture him on terrorism. My only problem with his response is that he doesn't go far enough. In addition to pointing out that Republicans are the ones that distracted us from the real terrorists in Afghanistan to go on their Merry Iraq Adventure, he should also point out that it was the Republican "September 10 mind-set" of ignoring terrorism to focus on their stupid Regan Rehash policies that enabled those terrorists to attack us in the first place.