I’d say it’s not a useful overview not only of the continuities and differences of counterterrorism between Obama and Bush, but a handy barometric guide to how the media will react in the event of catastrophe. For instance:

If terrorism has not been the driving force of the Obama presidency, neither has it been the catalytic issue to the American people that it was more than eight years ago, when the twin towers collapsed in a heap of steel, concrete and bodies. Yet that mood can change in a hurry, as the Christmas Day plot showed. Obama understands that, if only by the law of averages, there is a decent chance of a major attack on the United States during his presidency. And if that attack happens, any change in policy, no matter how incidental to the facts of the case, will be fodder for critics to blame him for the attack. When the aviation screening and intelligence systems that Bush built failed to stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian with ties to Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, from getting on a plane bound for Detroit with explosives in his underwear last month, a number of Obama’s political opponents blamed the sitting president. If Bush’s system was broken, they asked, why didn’t Obama fix it?

You’ll notice the tension between the two bolded sentences. Yes, there will be “fodder for critics” if there’s an attack and Obama has shifted course. And there will be those who ask why Obama didn’t change the broken system he inherited if there’s an attack as well. This is politics and that’s the way it goes.

But we in the press are not conduits for any old criticisms. It’s our job — as in what we get paid to do — to investigate the salient facts and context that undergird the validity of those criticisms. Jim Carafano and Marc Theissen are conservatives. Jim thinks Obama is just like Bush; Theissen thinks Obama is a dangerous divergence from Bush. The response of the press isn’t to say LOL silly conservatives. It’s, at minimum, to present a reader with a basis for adjudicating the dispute. Baker, in the piece, actually does a pretty good job of allowing a reader to adjudicate those disputes, despite the occasional lapse into this sort of equivalence. But those lapses indicate how likely it is that any line of criticism is going to gain currency with the press in the event of an attack, no matter how flimsy.

And now to take my own advice. Yo, Jim: what’s with this quote?

James Jay Carafano, a homeland-security expert at the Heritage Foundation, was blunter. “I don’t think it’s even fair to call it Bush Lite,” he said. “It’s Bush. It’s really, really hard to find a difference that’s meaningful and not atmospheric. You see a lot of straining on things trying to make things look repackaged, but they’re really not that different.”

I’m the premier progressive Jim Carafano fan, but the word “meaningful” does a whole lot of work in this analysis. I don’t recall Bush issuing an executive order repealing his interrogation techniques. I don’t recall him stripping interrogation responsibilities from the CIA and placing the FBI in the lead. I don’t recall him tripling troop levels in Afghanistan and ordering a regional and whole-of-government counterinsurgency approach. And that’s just me not trying to look really, really hard. I suppose you could object that none of those measures are “meaningful” and so Jim’s framework holds, but that would be kind of pedantic.