Wrong Question:
"Are We Safer Now Than We Were After 9/11?"

The answer to that is probably yes.

But:

It's pretty scary to realize that the answer is not clearly "yes."

And, of course: it's the wrong question in the context.

The right question? This one:

Is our current degree of safety as much higher than our degree of safety on 9/11 as it should be?

We're probably safer...but we should be a lot safer than we actually are. But instead of taking out the people who attacked us and focusing on effective anti-terrorism measures, we've wasted a trillion dollars on the unrelated war in Iraq. A war which could, all things considered, end up costing us three trillion dollars. And, in fact, a war that does not even rise to the level of being ineffective, but which is, in fact, actually counterproductive, making us less safe and thwarting our efforts against al Qaeda.

It's very, very easy to be a little bit safer than we were on 9/11. But that's setting the bar too low. This is not a complicated point, and the fact that Bush and McCain seem incapable of or unwilling to grasp it tells us much of what we need to know about those two men.