Always Prepared for Yesterday

Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today" ran this story about Obama vs. McCain:

Back to the Future

The New York Times reports that an adviser to John McCain accused Barack Obama of having a "Sept. 10 mindset." Obama responded by . . . exhibiting a Sept. 10 mindset:

The latest battle began when McCain's advisers held a conference call to attack Obama for comments he made in an interview with ABC News in which he said that he believed that "we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution," and noted that the United States was able to arrest, try and jail the culprits in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

"And, you know, let's take the example of Guantanamo," Obama said in the interview. "What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks--for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center--we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial."

The Obama antiterror strategy is to wait until terrorists kill American civilians, then arrest them and put them on trial. Of course, when we tried that in the 1990s, the eventual result was another attack on the World Trade Center. This one was far more successful, destroying the complex and multiplying the death toll nearly 500-fold.

Oh, and the men who carried out the attack were never arrested and put on trial, because it was a suicide attack. Another failure of the Bush administration!