It was long a favorite hawk trope to accuse anyone with reservations about various “innovative” policies—indefinite detention without trial, warrantless wiretapping, crusades to remake the world by force of arms—of being trapped in a “September 10th mind-set.” I don’t know whether he’s the first to use it in this way, but Andrew Sullivan has a nicely symmetrical tag for Rudy Giuliani: He’s in thrall to a 9/12 way of thinking. Unlike its precursor, the “9/12 mentality” seems to actually describe a widespread phenomenon, of which Giuliani is certainly an exemplar. Like the archetypal trauma victim, he seems to be perpetually reliving the now-tedious epiphany that there are people out there who want to kill us, and constitutionally incapable of believing that anyone else might have managed to apprehend this fact and still disagree with him. He shows no sign of having moved beyond the blind rage we all felt in the aftermath of the attacks to the cooler analysis required to prevent the next one. (Hence his sputtering reaction to what should have been an uncontroversial suggestion: that some terrorism is fueled by perceptions of U.S. meddling abroad, and that a wise foreign policy takes that perception into account.)

I’d like to see this one make it into wider circulation. It might remind people there’s nothing especially presidential about acting as though you’ve failed to learn anything over the past six years.