Show us where I clearly state that it was communicated to Bush during the publicity stunt that planes were being crashed into the WTC and I will take the rest of your post more seriously.
Seems to imply that Bush knew that Rome was burning.
Seems to imply that Bush knew that there was an emergency.
Seems to imply that Bush knew there was a crisis.
Same shit.
Seems to imply that Bush knew there was a “situation”.
Same shit.
Don’t bother “taking the rest of my post seriously”. You are obviously not capable of any kind of serious discussion of anyone’s posts, incluing and especially your own.
Regards,
Shodan
I was right; that was amusing. Thanks for the laugh.
Good bye, Shodan.
Yea, I thought it was amusing, too.
Especially the part where Shodan looked right and you looked wrong.
But hey, whatever helps you sleep at night.
Shodan: Good Show. I just saw the return of my $5. 
2sense: I agree that Shodan’s post was amusing. But do you carry the same view on the Bush situation, as you did before? If so, I’m just still confused as to what you think he should/could have done.
LilShieste
Still trying the win by fiat I see. Its not working 2sense…just an FYI. It didn’t work when you tried it on me…its not working now either. In case you hadn’t noticed, most people seem to agree that your case has been pretty weak.
Well, if you wish to cling to your illusions, thats your affair. Have fun with it!
-XT
How is that exactly? Care to explain how Shodan showed he was right that I clearly stated something by claiming I seem to have implied it several times? Or to put it another way: are you a glutton for punishment?
As I have already said to you once, Bush could have led the effort to respond. Your reply that you don’t see anything Bush could have done misses the point. Worse, it conceals the point. It is completely irrelevant whether anything could have been done. Even if your hindsight view were right, which I’m not conceding, that doesn’t excuse Bush’s lack of effort. He couldn’t have known then that he wasn’t needed. Or, more accurately, it was possible to make a determination that there was nothing for him to do at 9:03 when he entered the classroom but once he was in there he was no longer capable of monitering the situation. At that point he was relying on the judgement of others that his immediate presence wasn’t required. He was no longer in charge. Whoever was making the decision, minute to minute, to leave the President in the classroom was in charge. This is why I am faulting his leadership. He abdicated his responsibility to parties unknown by taking himself out of position to command.
I don’t believe I ever tried any such thing. You made an argument; I argued against it. Later when we were slinging mud I called your position discredited and that’s when you started this “argument by fiat” claim. Unless I am misunderstanding your meaning that claim is false. I never argued that you were wrong solely because I said so. There was no argument in that post at all ( this is the one on the 2nd page that references Agincourt ). The post was explanation not argumentation. I based no conclusions on some preconceived notion that you must be wrong. I concluded you were wrong because you have the weaker argument.
So? Am I a politician to change my position because it is unpopular? I often take unpopular stances. I, unlike all too many here in GD, am capable of admitting it when I am mistaken. I can be argued out of a position but I’ll be damned if I’ll be swayed by the crowd.
OK, 2sense, I think I can see the nub of your objection. That the president should have been monitoring the situation minute-by-minute, since it was unknown what would happen. And since he wasn’t monitoring the situation he was dependent on his aides to make decisions and give him information that he should have been getting himself.
But this misunderstands how a president operates. Suppose he was in a command post, “monitoring” the situation. What exactly would that mean? It would mean sitting by the phone, getting reports from his aides. The president wouldn’t be on the phone to talking to eyewitnesses, or looking up how much fuel a 767 carries, or going through state department records for lists of Saudi nationals in the US.
A president in a command post is absolutely dependent on his staff. His staff gathers the information for him and reports to him. The president does not , cannot and should not make all significant decisions. The fact is, the president is not, and cannot be as informed about issues and events as his staff is. The president’s Sec’y of Defense should know more about the military than the president. The Sec’y of State should know more about diplomacy. The Attorney General should know more about legal issues and law enforcement. And on and on. In other words, 99% of the time the relevant staff member should be making the decisions, not the president, even those things that require presidential authorization. In those cases the staffer recommends a course of action and the president either accepts it or gets himself a new staffer.
When you imagine the president “monitoring” the situation, what exactly are you imagining? Watching CNN? Why can’t someone else watch CNN and let the president know if anything gets reported? The truth is, “monitoring” the situation just means being briefed by his staff and being available in case his authority is needed. If Condoleeza Rice decides the planes need to be shot down she can’t call up the Air Force and give the order. She tells the president what needs to be done, and HE calls up the Air Force and gives the order.
At ALL times the president is dependent on the judgement of others. He has to sleep, right? If he needs to be woken for some emergency, the president is dependent on the person with the authority to wake him. If he’s at dinner, or meeting with Karl Rove to discuss campaign ads, or attending a $1000 dollar a plate fundraiser, or touring a factory, or making a speech, or reading a story about goats, or any of the thousand things a president does as a party member or head of state or human being, he is absolutely dependent on his staff to give him correct information and to make decisions in his name. If his staff is effective then good decisions get made. If the president doesn’t create an effective staff then his presidency will be a disaster. But at no time is the president not absolutely dependent on his staff.
Maybe it would make more sense to look at this from a logic standpoint:
You have 2 sets:
- A set of all possible actions that may be taken,
- A set of all actions that are taken.
Set 2 is clearly a subset of Set 1.
If Set 1 is an empty set, then Set 2, by definition, is an empty set.
Conclusion: The statement “It is completely irrelevant whether anything could have been done.” is a fallacy.
LilShieste
No, that’s not it. My objection is not that the President wasn’t gathering his own intelligence. That’s the job of his subordinates who the report to him. My objection to Bush’s behavior is that he wasn’t there to receive the reports. He wasn’t monitering his subordinates minute to minute. And notice we are talking about leadership during a crisis and not just everyday stuff. I’m glad you brought up sleeping though. Would you be so satisfied with Bush if he had went into another room for a nap during the attacks? Because going ahead with a publicity stunt during a crisis doesn’t seem so differerent to me.
She can just tell him only if she is in direct communcation with the President. Which she wasn’t. On 9/11 what she would have had to do was go to another room and interrupt the proceedings there, bring the President up to speed, and then ask for the order. By that time it might be too late. But if he were in direct contact with her all along getting constant updates he would already be up to speed and might reach a decision right then. Those few minutes can be the difference between life and death.
I’m not sure why this doesn’t make sense to you. I have clearly stated that even if there was nothing to be done there was no way of knowing that at the time. Do you get that? There was no way of knowing then that there was nothing more to be done, if in fact that was the case. The complaint isn’t that Bush didn’t find an opportunity to take some positive action. The complaint is that Bush wasn’t in position to take advantage of an opportunity to take positive action.
[nitpick]
Don’t you mean Richard Clarke here, rather than Condi? Clarke was the one who ran the government’s response to the attacks on 9/11 from the Situation Room in the white house. see here.
[/nitpick]
And as we have already explained, Bush was in a position to take advantage of an opportunity to take positive action. Bush can take positive action from anywhere (he doesn’t have to be at the White House, or some kind of Conference Room). Also, as we have explained, Bush should not be expected to take positive action if he does not have the intelligence (umm… information, that is) to make the decision to take action.
Would your argument be any different if Bush was unable to receive these reports because he was in Air Force One (or maybe a car, on the way back to the White House)? I am sure that the President’s aides would be able to reach him somehow, if they really wanted/needed to (what with cell phones, and all).
So you expect the POTUS to monitor his subordinates minute-to-minute? That’s a lot of monitoring to do (in fact, I’m sure it’s impossible, unless the POTUS is some kind of computer).
But… didn’t Cheney say that Clark “wasn’t in the loop”? 
LilShieste
You quoted other parts of my reply to Lemur866. Did you somehow miss this part?
“She can just tell him only if she is in direct communcation with the President. Which she wasn’t. On 9/11 what she would have had to do was go to another room and interrupt the proceedings there, bring the President up to speed, and then ask for the order. By that time it might be too late. But if he were in direct contact with her all along getting constant updates he would already be up to speed and might reach a decision right then. Those few minutes can be the difference between life and death.”
Thanks for the fun reading, Shodan. I felt like insulting an idiot to blow off some steam tonight, but didn’t have the time. Thanks for saving me the trouble.
furt:
[Moderator Hat ON]
furt, do NOT call a fellow poster and “idiot” here.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
Nope, I saw it. And I also addressed it (maybe not as directly as I should have).
If I can be contacted during some kind of family emergency, on my cell phone, then I would hope that the POTUS would be just as accessible to his aides. If he isn’t, then that’s a big problem that needs to be corrected (and I don’t think it would be Bush’s fault… unless he explicitly said “And, uh, no calls.”).
LilShieste
This doesn’t address the quote it responds to. My statement concerns being in contact not able to contact.
Lets try another way. Earlier I suggested Bush’s going ahead with the publicty stunt rather than staying on top of the situation was somewhat akin to taking a nap in the same situation. Lets imagine an alternate reality where Bush did go to sleep around nine that morning. Hopefully we all can agree that such an action would be an abandonment of a president’s role as commander in chief during a developing emergency of the magnitude of 9/11. If so then we can use our Bushes to examine the arguments that the President’s actions were proper. If the point applies to both Bushs then we know it can’t excuse him because nodding off is inexcusable. The real president groomed himself to be an Education President and the hypothetical president took a nap so lets call them “Groomed Bush” and “Nappy Bush”.
Now lets apply our tool to your post. Yes, the subordinates were able to contact Groomed Bush. They would also be able to contact Nappy Bush. So I’m afraid that’s no defense of the President’s actions. The viewers at home are encouraged to apply the tool to the rest of the thread if there remains any doubt the objections of the Bush defenders fail the “smell test”.
I’m not really sure of the point behind your analogy. It doesn’t matter to me if the POTUS was asleep, at a photo-op, or on the phone with a friend when the first tower was hit (it was relatively early in the morning by me, when it happened). Why are you so focused on what the president was doing when the events of 9/11 began?
As you said:
To me, this is really what matters. Bush could have been contacted by his aides, if they needed to give him some important information. Since his aides did not contact him with information critical enough for him to order an immediate action, he may as well have been asleep.
LilShieste
I’m not surprised. You seem to misunderstand or forget much of what I’m saying. The point is that if the attempts to defend the conduct of the President wouldn’t vindicate someone who was asleep at the wheel then they don’t exonerate the actions, or lack thereof actually, of President Bush.
This is a strawman. It’s not Bush’s actions at the beginning of the attacks that is being criticized but his response to them. Why do you keep mischaracterizing my arguments? They aren’t that complex and I’d say you could understand them clearly if you wanted to.
Yet again I refer you back to my previous point:
“She can just tell him only if she is in direct communcation with the President. Which she wasn’t. On 9/11 what she would have had to do was go to another room and interrupt the proceedings there, bring the President up to speed, and then ask for the order. By that time it might be too late. But if he were in direct contact with her all along getting constant updates he would already be up to speed and might reach a decision right then. Those few minutes can be the difference between life and death.”
Perhaps this time you will actually address the point? You know, that what you claim to be OK with could lead to a delay that costs lives?
AGAIN, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, we can’t use hindsight to justify the odd behavior of the President. They couldn’t know then whether they might need him to make a decision on a moment’s notice.
I’m not really sure why I wasn’t expecting the hits to go this direction.
Since I seem to keep missing the point of your previous post, let me quote it here, so I can address it directly.
Ok, I’m still interpreting the same way I did before. I guess I need some more clarification:
What is it you are suggesting? Do you think that the president should be in the same room as all of his aides, during any given time of the day? From the way I am understanding your post, that is the only way that the POTUS can be “in direct communication” with his aides. If I am missing another way that the president can be “in direct communication” with his aides, by all means fill me in. I thought the cell phone scenario would work just fine, but you don’t seem to agree.
I do agree that there are some occasions where a few minutes can make a world of difference. But I just don’t see this particular case as one of those occasions.
LilShieste