did “W” really read? while his country burned.
and did Cheney sit on his hands , keeping NORAD down 45 minutes after the WTC was hit?
Man, I just got all nostalgic for some reason.
Are you asking if that stuff happened? I think Google will help you out. Is there a topic you want to debate? If so, I’m not sure what it is.
President Bush, rather than going into a panic in front of a group of school children, terrifying them, continued to read a story that took only a few minutes to finish, then left. I do not like the guy, but there was nothing inappropriate in his response. There was nothing the president could do to fix the situation–particularly not in the time it took him to finish a short children’s story. It is not as though he was reading War and Peace to them.
Vice President Cheney had no direct control of NORAD and he did not “keep it down” for 45 minutes or 45 seconds.
The only place that “truth” appears in the lies and distortion of the ae911truth.org website is the word spelled out in the name. The website is filled with nutcase claims by people who do not know what they are talking about, with physicists making claims about structural engineering and English teachers pontificating on explosive devices.
We have argued their Conspiracy Theories to death over the last ten years and none of the claims brought forth have ever been shown to have a smidgen of accuracy.
That’s just what they* want you to think!
*The facts.
A less sympathetic view at George Bush’s behavior might be that after learning about the attacks, the President bumbled around in the classroom… for a total of 7 minutes. It was a funny sequence in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, but other than that it’s pretty thin gruel.
Then again, there were initial overblown reports about Bush’s decisive leadership at the time. So I suppose this silly story is a corrective.
I think you’re giving Bush too much credit. This was a series of multiple attacks. We now know there were four attacks being made. Bush had no idea how many attacks might be occurring - two? four? ten? twenty? He might have been needed to issue orders as the Commander-in-Chief. And for all Bush knew, the terrorists might have known his location and the Booker Elementary School might have had a plane flying towards it as he sat there and read his book.
I usually agree with just about everything you post, but I gotta take issue here. The question is not “with hindsight, do we know that 7 minutes would have made no difference”. The question is, “was there even a CHANCE, at the time, given the information that Bush had, that 7 minutes might have made a difference”. In other words, what’s more likely…
(a) Upon receiving the news that the second tower was hit, Bush instantly raced mentally through every possible contingency and agency that might be involved, considered and rejected dozens of likely possibilities and scenarios, and realized that there was sadly no action he could take at that precise moment, but continued to read to the kids while at the same time doing a bunch of mental planning for what to do once he had more information, or
(b) Bush sat there until someone told him to go somewhere else
I mean, on the scale of bad things Bush did this one is pretty low, but it is utterly and inarguably clear to me that this incident illustrates the extent to which Bush was not a personally strong and decisive leader.
(Also, I can not stomach the idea that not alarming a single classroom full of kids, who are about to have their ***ing worlds turned upside down on the evening news, is something that even REMOTELY relevantly should have factored into Bush’s decision making.)
It may not have been an issue of scaring the little kids.
It’s more an issue of not scaring the adults.
Alongside the children, there were journalists in the room; he knew that whatever he said would immediately get publicized.
If he had suddenly stood up, said “the country is under attack!” , and run out of the room with all his staff, it may have caused even more panic throughout the country.
He may have been thinking to himself “I need to project an image of calm”.
Or, of course, he may have been so shocked that he simply didn’t know what to do.
Today, we all know about Al Quaida and terrorism. But before Sept 11, nobody had put any serious thought into a terrorist attack on US soil. All the preparations, both physical and psychological, were for a cold-war style attack from a large military force .
Everybody was caught by surprise. I think it was Thomas Friedman of the NYTimes who wrote that Sept 11 was not a failure of security…it was a failure of imagination. And George Bush was not an imaginative guy.
So yeah, 7 minutes of indecision is a little too long …but I doubt if many other politicians in America would have performed much better. Maybe 4 minutes.
And it was just bad luck that he happened to be visiting a school with a book called “my pet goat” in his hands, instead of ,say, being on a vist to a factory and giving a speech about economics.
Bush made so many bad decisions during his presidency that I really do not understand why people feel the need to criticize him for this one, which was by no means obviously the wrong decision, and may very well have been exactly the right one. The likelihood that he (or even some much more competent president) could have done anything useful in the few minutes he took to complete his reading to the children is miniscule.
If only the entirety of his administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks had been remotely as calm and measured, many people, including many Americans who are now dead would be alive today, and the world as a whole would be a much better place. (However, I am inclined to blame the general funk, overreaction, and lashing out much more on Cheney than on Bush. Bush’s failure was more one of omission, a failure of leadership over his panicky minions.)
This is nuts. The response was completely inappropriate. We only know he couldn’t have done more in retrospect. What if he had to authorize the air force to shoot down more planes, or take some other action? He should’ve been immediately pulled to safety and put onto a conference call with the relevant people.
Saying “Mr. President, we need to leave now” and quickly leaving is not going to traumatize those kids, and the idea that the commander in chief should prioritize not upsetting a group of schoolkids over responding to an unknown attack on his country is ridiculous.
There is no justification for Bush not immediately giving his full attention information about the attack. I don’t feel like he ever got the full brunt of criticism for this incident - both because the OMG 9/11 WAS A HOLY DAY OF VICTIMHOOD idiots would never dare criticize anything related to 9/11, or because it was basically taken ownership by conspiracy theorists… but that whole incident is utterly baffling and shows a complete lack of judgment and leadership.
In addition, they could have done something. There was still time to save one of the planes, if they had instructed the crews sooner.
I’m not arguing that it was such an obvious move that they are more negligent for failing to do so. I’m also be he last person to suggest that Bush would have come up with a useful idea. It’s just not the case that it was impossible for them to have done anything.
I also second SemorBeef’s point. A president must have the skills to be able to extricate himself from social settings gracefully and without causing panic. The false choice between panic and sitting there with a pallid stupid look on your face is just dumb.
The adults who, if they walked outside the classroom and turned on CNN, would immediately have their lives changed forever?
I sure didn’t vote for John McCain, but I’m sure he would have left the classroom immediately.
Because, for me at least, it’s just so baffling that people tried to defend him about it. Like I said, it’s a very small deal on the scale of things, but one which I just can not understand how ANYONE can draw a conclusion about different from mine. The more important things he screwed up are very complicated issues with these massive “well, was he LYING or was he telling what he thought was the truth based on cherrypicked information, which may not count as lying…” ambiguities, whereas this is an example where the president of the united states received news that unambiguously told him that the biggest event in US history since Pearl Harbor was underway, and he sat there for 7 minutes reading a book to kids.
Sure, doing nothing might have ended up being the only decision (although I’ve seen a convincing argument that the fourth flight could have been saved had someone taken decisive action). But that’s what we know with hindsight. You’re presenting a false dilemma. Getting up and leaving the room and starting to talk to his advisors doesn’t mean they instantly have to actually DO anything. But it does mean they CAN do something.
Ironically, he got it wrong both times. In the situation where seconds mattered, he delayed. In the situation where there was no reason not to take additional weeks and months to let diplomacy and Hans Brix keep doing what they were doing, when there was no urgent time pressure and no reason not to double and triple check every piece of information, he rushed the nation into war. But, really, there’s no meaningful analogy between how a leader should act in the extremely rare moments of time-critical national crisis which thankfully come along only once a decade or less; and how a leader should act while deciding whether to go to war.
Would you believe that had never occurred to me until now?
I’m (obviously) still a bit angry about this whole issue… if anyone’s curious, here’s a thread I started about it right before the 2004 elections.
Bingo.
My understanding is that the news he got was “Mr. President, the country is under attack.” If anyone can correct or amplify that, please do.
The proper response would be to say “I’m very sorry, kids, but something came up and I have to go back to work as President now,” and leave the room.
I doubt the delay made any difference, but it shows a slow mind at work.
If you ask me, I don’t think presidents should go about reading books to classrooms of schoolchildren ever.
This is a pretty good point. The situation was kind of a Kobiyashi Maru, if the air force had become trigger-happy (for instance, if Bush had been sitting in the oval office when it started), they might have caused needless deaths of innocents. Not very likely, but it would have been very embarrassing.
That seems extremely unlikely. I think the Hinckley incident encouraged the whitehouse to pull the public calendar. Very few people know for sure where the president will be tomorrow.
And those kids would be like 18 now, it would be interesting to see one or two of them interviewed. What a bizarre claim to fame that would be, kind of like being Spencer Elden.
The idea that these kids are so delicate that the president calmly excusing himself to go do his presidential duties is absurd. “He didn’t want to scare the kids!” is seriously the most pathetic, weak, partisan-laden excuse I’ve ever heard for an executive decision of any sort. It’s just… mind boggling.
I mean, obviously he’s not going to run out there screaming WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!, he simply says “I’m sorry kids, but something has come up and I have to go do president things” and calmly walk out of the room. No kid is going to be scarred for life for that. And we’re talking about like, the off chance of startling a couple of kids possibly vs not being as informed as possible about making life or death decisions about the safety of your country.
Seriously, I can dismiss anyone who somehow defends the idea of reading to schoolkids in the middle of a crisis as ridiculously partisan or totally whackadoodle. This isn’t an ambiguous issue where both sides can have merit - it is fucking inexplicable and insane, a gross failure to lead and properly use executive power.