Things are different after 9/11?

Marshall Wittmann takes up the everything changed after 9/11 meme today. I'm sure that he made the Bushites very happy.

Increasingly, the political and opinion class has a pre-9/11 feel to it.

My question is, is that a bad thing? Did anything but the attitude of the American people change? Were we less safe after 9/11 than we were before? I believe we did indeed become less safe after 9/11 but that was the result of the policy of George W. Bush not al Qaeda. The world trade center was first bombed on February 16, 1993. There were a number of attacks following that one. If 9/11 changed everything it was only because it suited the purpose of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for it to do so. The attack on 9/11 was new only in scale and we will never see anything of that scale again. The initial war in Afghanistan accomplished that. If going back to a pre-9/11 feel means respecting the constitution and the division of powers I'm all for it. If a pre-9/11 feel means not fearing my own government as much or more than I do al-Qaeda I'm all for it. More Bull than Moose also criticizes the comparisons of Bush to Nixon and Joe Gandleman chimes in.

Accurate comparisons to Nixon so far fail because there is no sign yet that warantless wiretapping was conducted against the opposing political party to garner campaign political intelligence.

The key here is "no sign yet". This sounds just like something the Rovians would do and in fact that was suggested by conservative Paul Craig Roberts this morning. Over at Preemptive Karma Kevin tells us there are some similarities and some differences between Bush and Nixon.

What's interesting to me about all of this is both the similarities and the differences between the Bush administration and the Nixon administration.

Like Nixon, Bush is obsessed with stopping or preventing whistleblowers from within his own administration informing the public about activities that he would have preferred not see the light of day. Like Nixon, Bush has ordered domestic spying upon American citizens.

A key difference thus far is with their respective Attorney Generals. The 1973 AG, Elliot Richardson, refused to play politics on Nixon's behalf and instead resigned. So far the current AG, Alberto Gonzales, appears perfectly willing to do Bush's political dirty work. Whether then AG John Ashcroft willingly played ball when Bush first started the domestic spying is unknown.

What we do know is that Ashcroft's deputy AG, James B. Comey, refused to authorize the domestic spying program when he was acting AG while Ashcroft was in the hospital getting his gall bladder removed.

One important difference.