I should also add: this step was incomplete because of the nature of the event (and the element of surprise, etc.), not because the POTUS was not interested in finding more information.
LilShieste
[QUOTE=LilShieste
But you cannot give commands, or “lead” in a situation where you do not have complete information. And since “The first step in a response is to figure out what is going on” was an incomplete step, it would be impossible (and a bad idea) to try to advance to the second step.
LilShieste[/QUOTE]
Who said he should advance to the second step? I didn’t. 2sense didn’t. We are saying he never took the first step (try to prevent the attacks as they were happening, if possible). The second step (retaliation) could not and did not occur till much later.
Yes, he had aides looking into the situation. However, how could they keep him apprised of the situation while he was in the classroom? Andy Card told him we were under attack, but, as far as I can tell, Bush did not ask follow up questions and did not ask about our response (against the attacks, not the attackers) until much later.
You asked “why does the president have to respond from the bridge?” Valid point. But the president did not respond, from anywhere. He could have turned a classroom in the school into a temporary situation room. He did not.
xtisme, why do you keep calling me “Mombo?” It feels like an insult but I don’t get it. Also, X, I am an avowed pacifist and am against the use of Nukes under any circumstances unlike what you are implying.
No, its not an insult. I appologize, I simply never cut and pasted your name and for whatever reason thats what I THOUGHT it was. If you were offended, I offer you my appologies.
Well, I’m not a pacifist, but I’m sure as hell against the use of nukes…and I’m VERY much against a president that would fly off half cocked. However, short of throwing the US’s might around, I fail to see what the Prez COULD do during an attack. Again, neither you nor 2sense have listed out what you think the president could and should have done. I still can’t figure out why that is…certainly in hindsight you should be able to come up with SOMETHING you think he should have done.
You say so, and while I didn’t take it that way I’ll leave it at that. However, I STILL don’t see you actually responding with any discussion points. You still haven’t answered the basic question. You say the Prez wasn’t doing what he should have been. Fine. What exactly SHOULD he have been doing then? No vague hand waving, no “he should have taken charge from the bridge” or 'not fiddling while Rome burned) bs…exactly WHAT should he have been doing 2sense and Mambo?
What surprised me is that you seem to not realize that this IS the job of the president, and that a president, ANY president (at least in modern times) IS simply an actor or figure head. Its stunning to me that people who live here don’t understand the role of a modern president.
Again, its not Bush’s job to go out and get information…its others jobs to do that and bring it to him. Its not Bush’s job to figure out whats going on…its others jobs. Bush’s job (or ANY presidents job) is to be the figure head (for the public) and nominal decision maker (basically acting on the massaged data and positions presented to him by his staff), to act calm in a crisis, to await developments and (hopefully) make rational decisions once all the facts are known. Thats exactly what he did IMO.
You have yet to bring out anything that contridicts this. You’ve yet to produce any information stating that the SS WANTED Bush to move (for all we know they WANTED him to stay there until they knew what the hell was going on) and he or his staff overruled him so he could continue reading a book, that moving Bush was a good idea at all, or that there was anything Bush could have done that was more productive than him looking calm and collected while the information he needed to make an informed decision about what to do.
-XT
You don’t understand the function of a commander. A commander isn’t a legal advisor or a project coordinator or a den mother. A commander commands. His job is to give orders, right or wrong. If he gives the right orders then his people get to live; if not a lot of them may get killed. But right or wrong he must act because inaction leaves his people sitting ducks. An army is organized to work together to follow orders. When subcommanders are denied guidance from above they are forced to react on their own. The uncoordinated army is more likely to damage itself or nonaggressors and to get it’s ass handed to it by the enemy than one working together even if it is taking a less than optimal course of action. What a commander can’t do is wait before issuing orders. In the fog of battle there is no such thing as seeing the complete picture. That’s why they call it the “fog of battle”. A commander marshalls his forces and gathers intelligence in order to prepare for the best possible response to a crisis but has to be prepared to act on incomplete information and willing to accept the consequences for failure. That’s what a commander does.
And that’s what Bush failed to do. Rather than leading he went ahead with a PR stunt leaving him unable to effectively communicate with his subordinates. It’s not important where he might have led the response. The point is he didn’t lead it at all. He sat there and did what Ari Fleisher told him to do: keep his mouth shut.
Neither I nor the American people accept this cynical viewpoint. You can bet that Karl Rove won’t want Americans to think of George Bush as merely a figurehead come November. His personal reputation as a hardnosed Commander-in-Chief is his greatest political asset.
I just want to remind everyone that according to the position of the OP and OP supporters, we are talking about 5 minutes not three hours, not half an hour, not fifteen minutes…five. It would have taken Bush five minutes to get all the applicable people on the phone to say “are we sure of what’s going on?” and get confirmation. Or is it that you didn’t want him to get confirmation? Because I guarantee that y’all would be in here calling him a bloodthirsty cowboy if he’d shot some random plane out of the air. Sort of like Mambo absolutely knew it was Al Quaeda terrorism after the first hit.
For the record, i’m extremely unhappy with Bush SINCE that day, but in the end, the greatest ‘commanders’ in the world would be FLOORED by the news that the country was under a full scale attack, Clinton, Gore, Nader, Your Mom, or Michael Jackson. it took me five minutes to get myself together and evacuate my building since “Chicago was most definitely the next target” (good thing we confirmed that).
I would like to nominate the above for “Stupidest Thing Posted in a Bush-Bashing for March 2004”.
There was nothing Bush could have done, and he is a bad President for not doing it. WTF?
No, going off half-cocked is what an idiot does.
You seem to be implying that the first and only possible response to any situation is for the leader to immediately begin telling people to do something. It doesn’t matter what he tells them to do; he has to instantly issue commands or he is not being a leader.
So Bush should have reflexively begun directing nuclear strikes against, oh, anyone - it doesn’t matter.
I’m guessing you were never in the military. And the idea that Bush could not communicate with his subordinates is almost self-evidently stupid, since they were clearly able to communicate to him that the planes hit.
Again, I will ask, what orders should Bush have issued? Obviously you would have supported him if he had ordered anything at all, since “that is what commanders do”.
How about this;
[ul][li]Scramble every available fighter we have, and shoot down every plane in the air. No sense in taking chances - if it flies, it dies.[/li][li]Nuke Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and North Dakota. [/li][li]Round up every Muslim in the US and have them shot.[/li][li]We might have to worry about bio-terrorism - arrest everyone with a Ph.D. in biochemistry and send them to the camps.[/li][li]Cyber-terrorism might be bad too - shut down the Internet. Confiscate every server in North America. [/li][li]Some of the kids in this room might be terrorists - have them all tortured to see if they know anything. [/li][li]I don’t want a panic - shut down all the newspapers and TV stations in America.[/li][li]Get in touch with Ari Fleischer - I need to know what to do next.[/ul][/li]
All within five minutes of the news of the planes hitting.
There - happy with Bush’s strong, decisive leadership now?
Regards,
Shodan
You might be right on this one, but from what I’ve read (albeit from sources which don’t necessarily have the greatest reliability factor) there were only a couple of military jets in the air at the time, none of which were on patrol duty in that area. Of course, this isn’t something they’d necessarily tell the public if there were.
He was in the White House. Condy Rice said later that the staff was evacuated and Cheney was led to the East Wing bomb shelter.
I don’t understand: why wouldn’t there be folks on the other end of the line, i.e NORAD or something along those lines?
That seems like to me that a safe route to AF1 would be a given. After all, evacuation routes are planned ahead of time, and there is always the possibility that the President might need to be moved to it immediately. IIRC, the airport was only eight or so miles away-- he flew in on the thing. It stands to reason there would be a planned way to get him back to it if need be.
Fair enough, but I would think AF1 would be somewhat immune to that sort of thing. After all, it has to be able to be used in war time when you can’t count on normal frequencies. (In my foggy memory, I vaguely recall hearing in a documentary that the electronics on AF1 were designed to be able to shrug off an EMP. If it can do that, then a scrambler or jammer should be easily dealt with.)
Considering the school was so near to an airport, a plane crashing into it, even by accident, was something they should have considered. Heck, they could have just used their bomb threat contingency plan.
They may have cleared a small area over the POTUS, but considering the enormous amount of air traffic, I would be surprised if it didn’t look like there was a plane headed in that direction. I remember seeing the air craft map on the news on 9/11-- the country was so coverered with green symbols representing planes that you often couldn’t make out the state lines.
There were thousands and thousands of aircraft in the air. The media was reporting early on that air traffic control didn’t know which planes were hijacked. They were desperately tryng to contact all of them, but, again, contacting thousands of planes is a big job. There was honestly no way of knowing for certain that a plane in the vicinity wasn’t meant for the President. Perhaps it hadn’t even been hijacked yet. There’s no certainty in a situation like this.
They’ve had a few “wake-up calls” with him. Do you remember the story of the fellow that invaded a luncheon, walked up to the President’s table and handed him an eight page letter “from God”? If he’d had a gun or knife, Cheney would be president now. That alone should have told the Service that they needed to get back into gear.
Isn’t Limo 1 guarded? Do they really just park it, put a quarter in the meter and walk away?
The way I’m looking at it at the moment, reading the above, is that if it takes considerable time for the POTUS to be moved from a building into his car, he’s in a world of trouble. This is what the SS is trained to do.
Its pretty appearent then that you and possibly the American people (I doubt this in the majority but I’m humoring you) have a clue as to what the president does then. As to Karl Rove…its his JOB to spin things so they look good. Of COUSE he’s going to spin it that Bush is a hardnosed CnC. Sheesh. You think that Clintons handlers wanted to spin things so he looked like a cynical adulterer?? Get real. Again, its their JOBS to do so.
As to your comment to LilShieste, its appearent that you have never been in the military and dont know how a ‘commander’ REALLY works. Certainly you’ve never been in the Navy as your grasp of what a captain does is pretty tenuous.
-XT
I never said nothing more could have been done. The response of the command structure wasn’t perfect. There is the issue of when fighters were scrambled, for instance. But all of that is beside the point because this isn’t a critique of the command structure; it’s a critique of the President. If everything had gone exactly the same except that the President was leading the response then this wouldn’t be an issue.
Just because you find it convenient to infer this from my post doesn’t mean I was implying it.
They were able to but did they? We have only Bush’s statement that he was told of the 2nd attack and check the timeline, elsewhere his recollection is conveniently inaccurate. We don’t even know if they told him before he finished the photo op. This might account for his lingering after it was over. If, as the White House maintains, this is when he first realizes America is under attack how does he respond? He does nothing. He doesn’t even blink. He just continues to sit there without trying to communicate with anyone.
And look at what you are saying. We know that his staff communicated with him twice during the goat story. Once was the whispering in his ear and the other was the note that Fleisher held up telling Bush to hold his water. Who is in charge of the crisis response while this is going on? It’s whoever is making the decision that it is OK to continue to allow the President to sit in front of the class. Whoever Fleisher was taking his orders from.
No, I’m not ex-military and yes, I stand by my comments. Not that I need to, they stand alone regardless of who uttered them. A commander’s job is to command and it is dereliction of duty for a ship’s captain not to report to the bridge during an emergency.
If the idea that a president’s role “IS simply an actor or figure head” was generally accepted then this thread wouldn’t be so contentious. The fact that the Howler Monkeys jumped up to throw their excrement at poor acaveman for bringing it up indicates are wrong. But I doubt facts will change your mind. What is apparent to me is that you are unwilling to acknowledge my points let alone address them. I see no reason to waste more time on you.
Well, there’s a shocker…you were never in the military. Obviously your idea of what a ‘commander’ is comes from your vast experience in watching them on TV or your advanced training at the movies.
Gee, I’m really hurt that the guy that has yet to do anything but wave his hands about and who’s sole contribution to the thread boils down to “commanders have to command!” doesn’t have any more time for me. I see you STILL haven’t even taken even a cursory shot at actually ANSWERING and of the questions posed to you…but then thats not much of a surprise. A simple back pedel of 'I have no more time to waste on you…". Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out, 2sense…
-XT
It seems obvious to me you will grasp at any conclusion in order to avoid admitting your position has been discredited. I know what I know because I care to. I read history. I can tell you about the Sacred Band of Thebes, of the Barca’s and their campaigns against Rome, of Agincourt, and of Pucksinwah the War Chief of the Shawnee. In short, I know because I have engaged in open and honest inquiry. Try it sometime.
So…my position was ‘discredited’ because you say so, ehe? Don’t bother even trying to argue the points…just claim that its discredited and back out the door. Well, that clears THAT up. :rolleyes: You knows what you knows, and thats all there is too it. I see. Interesting debating style you have…victory by fiat.
(have you tried those shock treatments yet? They might help. Can’t hurt anyway. :))
Have a nice day, 2sense…
-XT
This goes too far and I’m sorry, xtisme. Nothing you have done in this thread demonstrates that you never seek the truth nor do I even believe that is so. You don’t seem an unreasonable poster in general and it was wrong of me to insinuate otherwise. My apologies. I suspect you are deluding yourself here not out of habit but because it is important for you to maintain your view of the President. We all have our blind spots. Remember, the fight against ignorance isn’t just external. Sometimes we have to battle ourselves in order to see the truth.
Just my 2sense
You said it was irrelevant whether or not something could have been done. Right here, when you posted -
OK, I’ve read this twice. I cannot parse it in any other way than to read, “The President is at fault for not issuing lots of orders within five minutes of hearing the news of the WTC attacks. It is irrelevant whether or not those orders would do any good, or what the orders were. His first reponse in any crisis must be to start barking orders. This is what a leader does, and is always a good thing.”
Does it really not occur to you how silly this is?
Yes, they did. You mention this yourself -
Fleischer takes his orders from the President, who you are faulting for either making the decision, or not making the decision. Or maybe for issuing orders that wouldn’t do any good. So he was apparently not in charge enough, or he would have issued some orders (pretty much at random) within five minutes. Or something.
I am wondering how things would have gone in your universe.
*The scene is a classroom, soimewhere in the US. President Bush is reading a story to a classroom of children. A member of his staff stands at his shoulder to help with the hard words.
Bush: “So, the first Billy Goat Gruff went across the bridge. Unfortunately, underneath the bridge, there lived a poster from the StormFront messageboard, and he said…”
Suddenly, an aide, looking concerned, enters the room. He crosses the room, leans forward, and whispers urgently into Bush’s ear.
"Mr. President, we have information that an aircraft has just been crashed into the World Trade Center. We believe this was a deliberate act of terrorism.
Under the 2sense Decisive Leadership Act of 2000, you must now issue an order every five minutes, or be impeached and removed from office. You have five minutes, starting now. Go!"
Bush, looking concerned, grits his teeth. Sweat breaks out on his forehead. “Can I call Karl?”, he asks.
“No, I’m sorry, Mr. President. You are on your own. You have four minutes.”
Bush jumps to his feet. His jaw juts as he does so, and a noticeable bulge develops in his suit pants.
“This looks like a job for - SUPER LEADER!”
Bush rips open his suitcoat to reveal a gaudy red, white, and blue uniform, with a big SL on the front.
“All right, you kids. On your feet! We’re going to do the Hokey Pokey to prevent panic!”
As the group begins the ritual, Bush leans over to his aide. “Does that count?”, he asks nervously.
“Yes, it does, Mr. President. It doesn’t matter what commands you issue, providing you issue them before the expiration of the Official Decisive Leadership Shot Clock. It has been reset to five minutes. Well done.”
Bush leads the children in the Hokey Pokey for a bit. Then a Secret Service agent confers with the President in a murmur.
“Mr. President, it has come to our attention that Jimmy - the geeky one in the third row - actually put his left foot out when he should have put his whole self in. What do you recommend?”
“Take Jimmy out and have him shot!”, barks Bush, in a crisp, decisive voice. “That will deal with the terrorist threat here at home!”.
Jimmy is dragged from the room, screaming, “No! No! NOOOOO! AIEEEEEEEE…BLAM!”
Bush glances at his aide. The aide nods reassuringly, and presses a button on the official Leadership Shot Clock, resetting it to zero. The rest of the class resumes the Hokey-Pokey with much more enthusiasm.
Finally, it all winds down. The children, panting, resume their seats. Bush glances at the clock.
“For my next command, I say - strip search the teacher. She’s a hottie.”
The Secret Service confer together briefly. One breaks off to speak to the President.
“There’s a problem, Mr. President. We don’t have the latex gloves for the cavity search.”
“Why not? Dammit - why doesn’t anything get done unless I check on it?”
“We’re sorry, Mr. President. We used up the last box on Jenna after Mardi Gras.”
“What’s that?” barks Bush.
“Never mind., Mr. President. Your clock is winding down. What will you do?”
“Get Cheney on the phone-talky thingus. And jump up and down on one foot.”
He grabs the phone, causing the Secret Service agent to off-balance and crash into the teacher. They both collapse to the floor as Bush bellows into the phone.
“Dick! George here! What’s the situation?..George! George Bush, who the hell do you think?..No, not that one - he’s my father.” (Bush breaks off to speak to an aide. “I am President, right? Check with Scalia and get that confirmed.” He returns to listen to the phone.
“Sorry, Mr. President - didn’t recognize your voice. This is Condi Rice. I am sorry to report that we lost the VP.”
“Lost him? What do you mean?”
"Under the 2sense Act, Cheney had to issue a command every five minutes, just like you. He chose as his first command to declare September 31st National Aardvark Achievement Day. He was going thru the alphabet in order, to buy time. Unfortunately, he forgot to do the ‘Thirty days hath September thing’ first, and therefore his command was invalid and his time ran out. In his case, his implanted heart defibrillator was programmed to deliver a 50,000 volt shock, and - well, it wasn’t pretty.
Now I’m in charge here, and I have ordered nude mud-wrestling matches on the front lawn of the Capital building for the duration. "
“Good work, Condi! I’ve got things covered here in - ah, that one state with the Harris chick - the one with the make-up problems, you know what I mean. Jeb’s state. Anyway, all set here. I am trying to come up with some more orders, but this darn Secret Service doesn’t have the supplies. I was going to command Congress to wear their underpants on their heads next, and then maybe we can nuke somebody.”
As Bush utters the word "nuke’, balloons drop from the ceiling, and a duck is brought in with a check in its bill.
“Congratulations, Mr. President - you have said the secret word, and now you get the $100.”
As the scene fades, the slogan is superimposed on the TV screen -
Bush - Who Cares What He Does? He’s Decisive! *
Paid for by the Bush for President in 2004 Committee. A Leisure Service of the bin Laden Construction Corporation. Demolition Our Specialty.
Regards,
Shodan
My appologies as well, 2sense. I was a bit annoyed by you claiming victory by fiat as well as that my positions were ‘discredited’ simply on your say so. To my mind nothing has been ‘proven’ in this thread, but again to my mind the case that Bush was derelict in his duty during that time has not been made.
As to my view of the President, its generally pretty low. I’m no fan of Bush, and I have never tried to defend him when he’s in the wrong (which is a fairly large percentage, IMO), but it annoys me that the anti-Bush crowd feels the need to bash him on EVERYTHING. There are enough real things the man has done that I’d cheerfully join in the roasting on…IMO this isn’t one of them.
-XT
2sense, you keep claiming that Bush should have “lead”, from the “bridge”. But what exactly are you talking about? Look, the country doesn’t have a bridge, and Bush is not the captain of the country. There is no one particular place that the president must be in order to give orders. Sure, the White House is a good place to be. Or Air Force One. But those places are just nodes in the communication network.
You are expecting the president to report to one of those “situation rooms” like in the movies, with giant display screens with maps of the globe, and icons representing nuclear missiles, and red circles appearing when a bomb goes off? And the president barking orders to deploy Task Force 7, get General Thornbottom on the phone, I don’t care if he’s in a meeting, and recalibrate the main deflector dish to emit a beam of tetryon particles!
The reality is that the president does not make tactical decisions. He sets policy. He selects his team. He is a manager. And he is a figurehead who gets up and makes speaches and looks presidential. He doesn’t make crisis decisions. His decision making capability in such events is very limited. Leadership doesn’t mean barking orders. It means selecting qualified people and letting them do their job and backing them up. Think about the bosses you’ve had. Were the best bosses the ones who constantly told you what to do? Or the ones who told you what your job was and helped you to do it and backed up your decisions?
What should Bush have done to provide “leadership” during this crisis? It seems to me that the best he could do to lead would be to tell his subordinates to do their job and get back to him when they had some information. And then wait until there is a policy decision to be made. And of course, there really is no need to call all his aides and give such an order, since it is standard operating procedure anyway. The order to shoot down planes wasn’t decided by Bush. Someone came to him and said something like, “Mr. President, at least 4 planes have been hijacked and are being used as bombs. I recommend that we authorize the Air Force to shoot down any planes that we know have been hijacked”. And the president would ask a few of this other key aides what they thought. And then he would back up the recommendation of his aide and give the order.
But the point is that the information needed to make that decision would be coming from the aide that made the recommendation in the first place. The president is absolutely dependent on his staff. They come to him and give him their plans and he either accepts them, or rejects them, or decides it is time for a new aide. But the president is ALWAYS operating blind. He either trusts his staff and backs them up, or he might as well resign.
And it seems to me that the best thing the president could do in a situation like 9-11 is to wait for someone on his staff to figure out what’s happening and formulate a response, and then give the go-ahead to that person’s plan. Until that happens all he can really do is wait, just like the rest of us. And while he’s waiting, the best thing he can do is remain calm and give the appearance of presidentiality, maybe make a boilerplate speech about evil-doers or some such. Or continue with his photo-op if the secret service don’t insist on moving him. Why would being stuck in his limo on some freeway be a better place than a previously secured location? He obviously had all the communication gear he needed, meaning a phone where he could recieve calls from Condi Rice and back up her decisions. What else should he be doing? “Lead”? OK, but HOW?
Are you serious? Do you really not understand that saying it’s irrelevant whether something is possible is entirely different than saying it’s impossible?
Again I am amazed at your apparent lack of understanding. Read the quote of mine again. Notice I don’t use the words “five minutes” or “barking orders”. I’m not certain why you are having difficulty understanding my words but I am sure it can’t hurt if you concentrate on what I have actually said.
Now these misunderstandings are just getting silly. I clearly explain that we don’t know what was whispered in Bush’s ear. Maybe he got an amazingly quick sitrep; maybe they told him the school cafeteria was out of tuna salad. We don’t know. This explanation follows the short sentence of mine that you quoted. I don’t see how you could have missed it.
???
Again, this is explained in my post. There is a sentence in between the 2 quotes of mine you give here. It deals with the 2 instances of communication with Bush during the publicity stunt. It goes like this: “Once was the whispering in his ear and the other was the note that Fleisher held up telling Bush to hold his water.” Since Bush is sitting there and Fleisher holds up the note FOR the President, clearly it wasn’t Bush who ordered Fleisher to do that.
Now then, how about answering the point I made there. If Bush is sitting at a photo op, who is in charge? Specifically, who is deciding, minute to minute, that the 9/11 attacks aren’t yet a severe enough crisis to change the President’s schedule?
No. I never said that even once. What I am claiming is that Bush didn’t take command. I used a naval metaphor in which the bridge represented command but I never said the President should report to the bridge; only the metaphorical captain. For our purposes here I don’t think it matters much where the President takes command. It could be right in that same classroom for all I care so long as he was in contact with his team staying on top of the situation minute to minute.
Wrong. It has already been mentioned that only the President can authorize the fighters to shoot down another plane. That’s a tactical decision and not one the President was in a position to make sitting there listening to the story about a goat.
Wrong again. Do you know what the “football” is? It’s a container with the launch codes for our nuclear arsenal. Everywhere the president goes the football goes along in case the president needs to make a crisis decision.
I’ve already said that a commander isn’t just a leader. She is not a supervisor or a VP of Marketing. A commander holds people’s lives in her hands. It’s a very different thing. Sure if things are going smoothly then she can afford to sit back. But that doesn’t describe our government’s response to this crisis now does it? 9/11 was a clusterfuck and it is the job of the commander to get things straightened out. If that requires barking orders, kicking ass, or even worse then that’s what it takes. If someone’s feelings get hurt that’s too bad. There are more important things at stake.
He should have put himself in a position to be able to communicate with them effectively. Instead he went ahead with a publicty stunt.
But that’s silly. He was in phone communication with his staff. How would moving to another location improve his communications? Why do you think he wasn’t in contact “minute by minute”? He had a phone. His aides were constantly on the phone. When there was new information they informed the president. When they needed a decision from him they asked for it. When was he out of contact, or unavailable to make decisions?
And I believe you are completely wrong that the best thing to do in a crisis is bark orders and kick ass and make things happen…when you don’t know what is going on. That is not the president’s job. Yes, if one of the president’s people isn’t doing their job, then the president has to kick their ass. But ranting and screaming at people who are doing their jobs is terrible managment and totally counterproductive. Do you have any specific information that some people on the president’s staff did terribly that day and would have done better if the president had screamed at them?
Sure, the president is C-in-C, not just a VP of marketing. But generals and other people in the chain of command don’t get things done by screaming orders at captains and majors and colonels, even in a battle. Sure, there may be screaming neccesary. Drill seargeants scream at recruit privates routinely. But if the whitehouse requires screaming to get things done then you’ve got a piss-poor excuse for an administration. It means that the president has selected people for critical positions who can’t do their jobs.
And I also disagree that the president makes minute-by-minute decisions about things like launching nuclear bombs or shooting down planes. Shooting down the planes isn’t a minute-by-minute tactical decision, it is a policy decision. The president doesn’t assess the situation and give the order: “Flight 207 is behaving erratically. General Thornbottom, scramble a flight of F-16s from Camp Bumblefuck and shoot it down.” No, someone said to him something like: “Mr President, if we think a plane is going do be driven into a building, do we give the military permission to shoot them down?” And he just said “Yes” or signed the piece of paper because he trusted the judgement of the official who recommended that course of action. And the guy actually making the decision to shoot down a particular plane would be an air force officer, or maybe even a fighter pilot.
Even in a nuclear football situation, it would be more like: “Sir, do we have permission to execute plan Zeta-3?” And the president either gives permission or asks for other options.
The president’s primary function is selecting competant personnel and acting on their advice and backing up their decisions. Think of the million decisions that need to be made by one of the minor cabinet secretaries. Sure the president reviews those decisions sometimes, but 99% of the time he just ratifies the decisions his subordinates make. And if Condi Rice can’t get the information she needs to the president about what decisions he needs to make during a terrorist crisis, then the president needs to fire her and get someone who can.
The president doesn’t need to get on the phone and scream at his staff that he needs answers, dammit, ANSWERS! They already know that the president needs answers and are scrambling like hell to provide those answers. If the president feels the need to call up one of his staff and scream at them, then that staffer needs to be replaced.
Show me on the video where he uses a phone.
This is the same old Red Herring with a new bow rapped around it. Maybe everything was well in hand ( though it wasn’t ) but the President couldn’t know that because he wasn’t monitering the situation. Remember, they don’t know what the enemy will try next. They have to be prepared for anything. Going into a classroom full of students for a photo op isn’t the way to prepare for the unknown.
Wrong. The policy is already established: we will shoot down planes only on orders from the president. Whether or not the tactical situation warrants such an order is a decision which ( notice the policy ) can only be made by the president. The president can ask for advice but the decision is his alone.
What I understand is that you cannot remember from moment to moment what you are talking about.
You are faulting the President for not acting immediately, and dismissing as “irrelevant” whether or not it would have done any good. Which is one step down from idiotic.
No, you clearly stated that it was communicated to Bush that planes were being crashed into the WTC, which is what started this whole ridiculous demonstration of apparently deliberate stupidity.
No, we do know. At least, I do, and anyone else who has been paying attention knows. You apparently used to know, but have now decided that you don’t.
Or are you now claiming that Bush is a bad President because he doesn’t act decisively enough on the school lunch menu?
Which word was too hard for you?
I think maybe you should come back to this thread after you
[list=a][li]Have practiced your reading skills a little[/li][li]Figured out if Bush is to blame for reacting or not reacting[/li][li]Why Bush is not in charge when he decides things, but is when he doesn’t[/li][*]Generally get a grip.[/list]