Returning to a pre-September-11 mentality

Adam Cadre wrote this a long time ago, but I only found it recently:

John Kerry for President

In the article, Cadre was explaining why he preferred Kerry to Bush in 2004, and noted that someone tried to insult Kerry by saying he had a pre-September-11 mentality. I like it for its focus on results, especially given the amount of security theater we've seen in recent years.

Cadre says it would be great if the whole country returned to a pre-September-11 mentality:

September 11th taught us that if we blow off monitoring terrorist activity, terrorists can currently succeed, once every several years, in killing almost as many people in a single day as die that day from smoking-related illness. It was a lesson that we had to be extremely vigilant in protecting against terrorist attack. It was not the worst day in American history (the casualties inflicted on 11 September 2001 would have classed it as a minor skirmish in the Civil War) and it was not an all-purpose excuse for murdering tens of thousands of civilians. So I would actually welcome a return to the pre-September 10th mentality — perhaps to the 31 December 1999 mentality that actually foiled the bombing of LAX and was focused on things like rounding up loose nukes instead of remaking countries with imaginary arsenals.

Correction: I had described this article as referring to why Cadre preferred Kerry to Bush in 2000 instead of 2004, until Doug corrected me in his comments and then later demanded I correct this post as well. So now it's correcter.