Whenever Democrats accuse George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a scare tactic or talking point it tells me that the accuser, not the President, is set on trivializing the attacks of that day. If things are so good that you can’t see beyond the partisan implications of world-historic catastrophe then you’ve settled into a deadly kind of decadence.

On the flipside, I think you can say the same of people whose response to dodging a nuclear bullet is to snicker.

The NIE, if accepted at face value, means nothing less than the nullification of the deadliest threat we faced. Less than a week ago, we understood our Iranian options to be abysmal and worse. An Iran hell-bent on nukes demanded either military intervention or de facto surrender (and this is to say nothing of the consequences of an Iranian nuclear launch.) One would think averting, if not facing down, this menace a cause for celebration. Yet, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Hillary Clinton, and other Democrats have found nothing more than an opportunity for political calibration. All they’ve done is tsk tsk the Bush administration for its hardline approach to Tehran (while ignoring that it’s this very tactic which yielded Iranian compliance.)

In going down this road, Democrats are endorsing a dangerously cynical analysis. Any genuine threat is downplayed as a scare tactic, and any success is denied as Bush PR. As the Left continues to react to potentially world-shaking events with political haymaking, we’re left wondering where they actually stand on those events. That is, if such things matter to them at all.