Also, don’t miss Roderick Long’s That Pre-9/11 Mindset: Meet the New Normal

Also, don’t miss Roderick Long’s That Pre-9/11 Mindset: Meet the New Normal, Same as the Old Normal which hits some of the same points Balko does. Long:

Critics of the current régime’s so-called “NIKE SHOXon Terror” are often accused of having a “September 10th” or “pre-9/11″ mindset. (Our ever-articulate Prince President garbled both descriptions into the phrase “pre-September 10th mentality” during the first debate.) The suggestion is that everyone’s worldview should have been radically transformed by the events of September 11th; anyone whose worldview wasn’t so altered, anyone who continues to favour diplomacy over a resort to military force, must simply be blind to reality.

But there’s a problem with this argument: it assumes that everyone’s worldview needed changing. After all, any worldview that was radically altered by the September 11th attacks must have been radically mistaken to begin with. But anyone whose understanding of the world was substantially correct would not have had his or her overall view of things shaken by those events.