Jonah — Your response to Drum is excellent, but there’s one point you missed: Kerry himself says 9/11 didn’t change all that much. Here’s the relevant passage from the Oct. 10 NYT Magazine piece:

When I asked Kerry how Sept. 11 had changed him, either personally or politically, he seemed to freeze for a moment.
”It accelerated — ” He paused. ”I mean, it didn’t change me much at all. It just sort of accelerated, confirmed in me, the urgency of doing the things I thought we needed to be doing. I mean, to me, it wasn’t as transformational as it was a kind of anger, a frustration and an urgency that we weren’t doing the kinds of things necessary to prevent it and to deal with it.”

If Kerry’s view of 9/11 is that it just “confirmed” the need to do the things he already wanted to do, that’s scary.