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The really scary part is that we’re *still* making the same mistake.

Before 9/11, the Bush administration’s national security focus was on missile defense, not terrorism. In fact, on 9/11, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was set to deliver a speech that focused “largely on missile defense.” Writing at the Huffington Post, Joe Cirincione — president of the Ploughshares Fund — recalls this quote from Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) on Sept. 10, 2001, warning against the Bush administration’s approach:

We will have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat while the real threats come into this country in the hold of a ship, or the belly of a plane, or are smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack.

Cirincione writes, “If George Bush had listened to Joe Biden instead of Donald Rumsfeld, the history of the past seven years would have been very different. We might have prevented 9/11.”

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Look at this, another Obama proxy calling average people ‘bitter’. Really, the Dems need to get in touch with… what? She’s a McCain supporter? Ah, never mind.

“The people out, you know, who are the rednecks or whoever, are bitter.” – McCain surrogate Her Royal Highness Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, CNN, 9/17/08

Ah yes, nothing shows that John McCain understands the plight of working Americans like a woman with a royal title and $100 million referring to American voters as “rednecks” in the middle of an economic crisis. I’m thinking Her Royal Highness is about to join Carly Fiorina in a secret undisclosed location for the rest of the campaign.

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I’m not sure if this makes the current problems more his fault or less..

With Wall Street’s financial institutions in turmoil, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) argued in a series of interviews today that his experience on the Senate Commerce Committee meant he knew “how to fix this economy.” “I understand the economy. I was chairman of the Commerce Committee that oversights every part of our economy,” McCain told CNBC’s Squawk Box. Watch it:

But, as the Washington Post points out, the Commerce Committee doesn’t oversee “every part of our economy,” let alone “the very areas now in crisis“:

In fact, it is the Senate Banking Committee that has oversight of “banks, banking and financial institutions; control of prices of commodities, rents and services; federal monetary policy, including the Federal Reserve System; financial aid to commerce and industry and money and credit, including currency and coinage.”

According to its Web site, the Commerce Committee oversees 13 areas, beginning with the Coast Guard, and continuing through “regulation of consumer products and services … except for credit, financial services, and housing” — the very areas now in crisis.

It’s not that surprising that McCain is confused about the Commerce Committee’s economic responsibilities, considering that he freely admits, “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.”