Well, now we're getting to it

A couple of days ago, I posted that America should be asking Who dropped the ball on 9/11?
Well, its starting to happen, all brought about by Cheney's incredibly stupid remark about how America would only be safe by voting for Bush. The New York Times editorial and Maureen Dowd both write about this, but Dowd is more interesting. She says Cheney Spits Toads: ". . . Cheney implies that John Kerry couldn't protect us from an attack like 9/11, blithely ignoring the fact that he and President Bush didn't protect us from the real 9/11." (emphasis mine). She continues " Mr. Cheney warns against falling back 'into the pre-9/11 mind-set,'' when, in fact, the Bush team's pre-9/11 mind-set was all about being stuck in the cold war and reviving 'Star Wars' - which doesn't work and is useless against terrorist tactics. The Bush crowd played down terrorism because Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger had told their successors that Osama was a priority, and the Bushies scorned all things Clinton. The president shrugged off intelligence briefings with such headlines as 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States'' because there was brush to be cleared and unaffordable tax-cutting to be done."
What Cheney appeared to mean by the "pre-9/11 mindset" remark is that the "old way" of dealing with terrorists by legal processes (arrest, trial, prison) is not as good as the "new way" of military processes brought to America by the Bush administration, using 9/11 as an excuse.
So far, the new way includes The Patriot Act, no-fly lists, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Gharib, outsourcing torture, denying the Geneva Conventions, alienating allies around the world, promoting preemptive war, redacting reports critical of allies like Saudi Arabia, outing CIA agents, death by container, actual murder or something like it (when Bush, in the 2002 State of the Union, talked about people "not being around anymore"), utter failure to progress on the Palestinian issue, and, of course, the wars in Afganistan and Iraq - all enacted with the meme of "keeping America safe", which they did not do and will not apologize for. Nor will they take responsibility for how terrorist acts are increasing around the world, and how a generation of Arab youth into new terrorists.
Gee, I think I'm getting a little shrill.