Ooh, I want to try…
Visiting Ground Zero
Wow. Bush was low-key and respectful. He talked about the tragedy and how it affected us as a nation and him personally. He didn’t use the occasion to grand-stand or campaign or sling mud at John Kerry. Good show.
Ah, who am I kidding? It’ll probably be like this…
Visiting Ground Zero
Saying “Bring it on!” again? Insulting Kerry? Using the visit to call your opponents un-American? Claaaaasy!
Is there some kind of link malfunction here? Nothing happens when I click either…
Well, the sheen is wearing off for me too. But it is relevent to the discussion you and I are having about the high level of angst that liberals seem to exhibit over this issue. I know you did not say AWOL. Try and keep up. I said that some of your allies said this. What I am trying to get you to do is help explain why your friends/allies/philosophical agreers/whatever you want to call them jumped so heavily into this fray. Why these seven minutes are so personal to them. I know you want to have it both ways and say that it was a big mistake, you don’t care very much about it, AND you want to yell at Mr Moto for his OP. I simply cannot get all those positions to gel into coherence.
Everyone keeps comparing Bush’s reaction in those minutes to theirs when they first heard about the attacks. But remember, he had had a conversation abour the first plane hitting the WTC before he went into the school room. President Bush remembers less alarming scenario at that point than Dr. Rice, but the point is that they had had a conversation. So, he already knew that there were people working on whatever the situation was. Then, at 9:05, Andrew Card whispers “A second plane hit the second tower.America is under attack.” Remember, again, that he knows people are looking into this and that they are competent enough to get him out of there if they need his authority. This is quite a bit different from being awakend from sleep and finding the nation under attack. It is quite a bit different from having your mother call you to turn on the TV. It is quite a bit different from a captain in the mess when his ship is attacked.
So, he finishes his meeting with the children and takes some pictures. Before 9:15, however, he was in another room “…where he was briefed by staff and saw television coverage. He next spoke to Vice President Cheney,Dr.Rice,New York Governor George Pataki, and FBI Director Robert Mueller.”
This seven minute gap is refered to as fiddling while rome burns, neglecting his duty, and even severe neglegence. Let’s get some perspective people. This attack is simply a political soundbite with a little teeth. It is not evidence of gross incompetence. It is not evidence of indifference. It is ridiculous and specious. And a post lampooning it by turning the attack agains Senetor Kerry is quite funny.
Thank you all for the lively debate.
(nitpick) It’s “The Pet Goat” folks. Michael Moore got it wrong. Oh, sorry, he LIED!!!
What’s funny about all this is that if Shrub hadn’t stolen the election, it would have been Gore as president. The searing heat of the Republican microscope would have been on him from day one, and if he had sat around looking doofy and then wasted time by saying goodbyes and waiting until the press left, the white hot fires of warped conservative wrath would STILL be burning bright to this day.
Of course, Gore has intellectual curiousity, and compassion for people, and deep intelligence, so he would have gently excused himself and gone to see what was going on. He would have taken the prior warnings seriously and would have known immediately that it was a terrorist attack.
He also wouldn’t have taken away many of our liberties, frittered away the surplus, flushed our reputation around the world down the toilet, screwed around with the environment, or misled the country to send our troops to die in a bogus war, just to mention a few things.
(daydreaming at what the country would be like, wakes up to the nightmare of reality)
Soundbite, pervert? That ain’t a soundbite.
THAT’S a soundbite.
I read a lot of it. I started skimming after a while though. It seemed like the same stuff was getting said on each side repeatedly. This in turn brought evangelists to mind, since I imagined each side repeating their arguments over and over, only increasing their volume in the belief that it will get their point across.
I meant no offense to any one with the evangelist comment (except maybe to envangelists). 
It was just the image that came to mind.
Perhaps the things in my post have been mentioned, but this debate is largely opinion. My post was my opinion.
I remember seeing repeated mentions of the 7 minutes possibly helping the airliners (flight 93 in particular). Maybe they were all from the same person? I will also say that we don’t know what would have happened had flight 93 got earlier warning. Maybe the flight could have been saved? Regardless, I don’t believe that Bush could have personally got warning to the flight with that extra 7 minutes. I don’t believe that was his job.
It seems that the 7 minutes does matter for other reasons though. A lot of posters are using that 7 minutes as a basis for Bush being a good leader or not. I don’t happen to feel that it matters.
They helped return a sense of normalcy that was sorely needed. How many times did you hear something similar to, “things will never be the same” in the first few weeks after 9/11? It was one of the most overused cliches of that period. Things have indeed changed, but they are much more like they were before than most wanted us to believe back then.
I was happy with Bush’s response to al-Qaida and the hunt for bin Laden. The policy for Afganistan seemed firm, but properly measured. You may have a point about people rallying around the flag, but Bush was the figurehead attached to the flag. He was the one that we listened to. He was the one that was calm and firm on our television screens when we were full of fear. Perhaps that started that morning in front of the children?
Others have pointed out that they feel that Bush would have also been slammed had he left the classroom immediately. They say he would have been accused of panicking. The bashers in this thread deny this and say they would be fair and objective. Obviously there is no way to prove what would have happened one way or the other, but to me this thread is evidence that people would have searched desperately for fault. Human nature seems to be that way.
As far as why I read the thread in the first place? Well, I don’t vote by party lines. I’m an undecided voter. I’m happy with Bush’s initial response to 9/11. I’m unhappy about the war in Iraq. There are many other things on both sides of the fence.
I had just read an article talking about the gains from the Democratic convention and how the Republican strategists felt that it could have been worse had Kerry went more negative. The article goes on to say that the Republics don’t plan to make the same mistake. They plan to get dirty. With me, that in itself chalks one up for Kerry.
As I said, I’m undecided. This thread isn’t something that is going change my opinion much one way or the other. It does seem like excessive nitpicking to me. Is this really the worst thing you have against Bush? It doesn’t seem bad at all to me. In that light, the nitpicking of the Bush bashers actually makes one small positive tally on Bush’s side with me. Is that what the Bush bashers are really trying to accomplish?
Man, I can’t believe you’re saying this–the president, an impediment?!
But you’re right in the case of El Chimpo: he IS an impediment to accomplishing any rational political goal in this country.
Bush has since said, he saw footage of the crash on a TV in the school "and I used to fly myself, and I said: ‘There’s one terrible pilot. It must have been a horrible accident.’ "
Kerry, also a pilot (right?) has said that the weather was so clear that he knew immediately that it couldn’t have been an accident; that we were under attack.
Who’s your president NAOW, pervert?
(I swear, I doubt no one would want pervert to shut the hell up more than W himself: I have never seen such damning arguments against Bush as pervert’s defense of him.)
Bush supporters hurt their own credibility when they can’t even admit the smallest screw ups of their Hero. I would actually be very impressed if I heard a Republican say “Gee, maybe our president should have exhibited just a bit more inquisitiveness after receiving those bone chilling words about our nation being under attack, and maybe he shouldn’t have just sat there reading as if he was more interested in the brilliantly electrifying plot of My Pet Goat than what was happening to our country…but I still think that in spite of his shortcomings, he is a great president and fortunately, in restrospect, we can say very little would have changed if he had behaved differently.” I would be impressed because it would show that at least the supporter is able to see both the good and the bad things about Bush, and is not blinded by Our Boy Can Do No Wrong partisanship.
That’s why we keep having these damn threads. There is always a few people who want to rationalize Bush’s inaction in all kinds of convoluted ways, unwilling to even admit the possibility that there was a much better way of reacting and responding. Or we get stuff like the OP: “Let’s point the finger at somebody else (Kerry, Clinton, Captain Kangaroo) in an attempt to excuse–or distract everyone away from–Bush’s ineptitude!”
by pervert
(bolding mine)
First of all, he didn’t just learn that things were worse than they thought. You make it sound like he just watched “Gigili” or something. He learned that America is under attack. That sentence alone merits at least:
“Come again, Card? Did you just say what I think you said?”
“Yes, Mr. President. America is under attack.”
[pensive pause as the reality of the situation slowly sets in]
“What do we know?”
I don’t know why it is so hard to even admit that he should have asked “what?”. That was the first word out of my mouth when I learned of the news, and when the answers were not satisfying enough (I was sitting in class and found out the very basics from a classmate who came to class late), I went straight to the media center to get some understanding from the TV. And I didn’t even have the upfront knowledge that “America is under attack”; a large part of my silly mind entertained the idea that this was pilot error times two. I imagine that if I did know that this was terrorist event, not only would I be asking “what?” but I’d also be asking “who?” and “how many?”
Secondly, you keep refering to “only 7 minutes”, but that’s only because that is the part that is caught on tape. What makes you think that as soon as the tape stopped rolling, Bush was transformed from kindergarten stooge to Fearless Leader of the Free World? What if it comes out that it took Bush a whopping 13 minutes to even inquire on the status of the WTC towers? Is your “only” going to be pushed back to 13 then?
Are you serious? Several thoughtful, intelligent people have stated over and over their reasons why this is a worthy topic of discussion, one of them being the lack of intellectual curiousity of the man we call president. I can’t believe someone would chalk one up to Bush because we find that odd.
You can bet that FDR didn’t continue on doing something trivial and unimportant after hearing about Pearl Harbor. He at the very least would have turned on the radio and asked aides to get him as much information as possible.
And no, it’s not the “worst” we have against Bush. This is just one thread about just one minor, but telling, issue. I personally find killing hundreds of American troops and thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens for no good reason much worse.
what difference can 7 minutes make???
9:57 am passenger revolt begins
10:03 am flight 93 crashes
or even a tad less than 30 minutes
9:28 am takeover starts
9:57 am passenger revolt
to be fair i do believe that as soon as gwb’s aides knew of the second plane they should have asked him to leave the room and then tell him about the attack. they should not have told him in front of the kids and tv cameras.
the 9/11 commission report does state on page 35 that most federal agencies learned about the crashes from cnn. it seems that kerry did do what all other federal agancies were doing… watching tv and finding out what is happening.
what i did that am.
i walked into my room at work, someone said “a plane crashed into wtt, what do you know?”
i said " i’ll turn on the news."
i heard charles gibson say a plane had hit the wtt and go to the reporter on the scene.
the reporter on the scene and diane sawyer both said " OH MY GOD!!!"
i looked at the radio and said “what, what??”
charles gibson then said another plane has hit the towers, we are under attack.
i blinked at the radio a few times, opened up a staff email, and emailed the staff of my office that planes had hit the towers and it was an attack. i then called a relative at navses to see what she knew or heard, also to check on which mail route my cuz was running that day in nyc. i then checked the sdmb for info.
perhaps bush should check the sdmb when the fan gets struck.
The posters might be thoughtful and intelligent. I don’t see what that has to do with the debate or what was posted.
I didn’t find this to be a lack of curiousity on Bush’s part. Obviously he was on film at the time or we wouldn’t be debating a film clip. I see nothing wrong with not wanting to start a panic. I also see nothing wrong with trusting that his people would pull him out of the classroom if there was a timely decision that he could make. Nukes were not going to fly. We didn’t know who attacked us, so there was no reason to order immediate air strikes. The only thing even suggested here was that he could have gotten the word out to flight 93. Sorry, the President is not an air traffic controller. Gathering information? There were literally thousands of people doing that already.
If he would have left the classroom and it wouldn’t have changed my opinion. Also, if you read my first post, I find no fault with Kerry’s actions. Hindsight being 20/20, there may be plenty of fault to go around for the 9/11 tragedy. I don’t think any of it lies in the 7 minutes in question here.
There is also the question of Presidential security. There is lead time required whenever the President moves. Chances are they felt they were in a searched and secure area. Why risk moving him into potential harm?
I’m confident that Bush’s aides were doing exactly that.
As I mentioned, I’m not a fan of the war in Iraq. As a result of that and other things, I don’t know where I will cast my vote.
This issue might be telling to you. There hasn’t been anything presented to make it telling to me. I do find it telling that none of you would touch my statement about Bush’s overall actions regarding 9/11 and how it was very popular with the majority of the population. Instead you are grasping at 7 minutes to try to undo months of firm, guided leadership. I’m not buying that.
Umm… subtract the and in that sentence.
The problem is that there has always been a widespread percepion that Bush is shallow - a man who’s basically acting as an amiable figurehead for the people who are really running the country from behind the scenes. Most people view this possibility unfavorably. Bush supporters usually disupte it and say Bush is in fact in charge.
But what we’ve seen here is a group of avowed Bush supporters who seem to be saying that Bush is indeed a figurehead President; someone who doesn’t need to be brought into discussions about important issues because the decisions will be made without him and he’ll simply be told what to do by his handlers. And the strange thing is that these supposed Bush supporters seem to view this situation in a positive light.
No, I don’t regard George Bush as the Anti-Christ. I just regard him as someone who doesn’t have what it takes to be President.
Come on! Don’t be freakin’ ridiculous. None of us are stupid enough to consider the President to be panicking when a crisis comes up and he interrupts a photo-op to deal with it. That’s his freakin’ job for heaven’s sake!
Of course they’ll go negative. Their only hope at this point is to demonize Kerry to the point where people will stick with the devil they know. Let’s hope the public is not so stupid.
I can do nothing more than repeat my post from page 1 (this time with some bolding added):
And, of course, I now see this as part of a larger pattern with Bush. I don’t think it is coincidence that the same man who did not have the intellectual curiosity to find out what was going on on 9/11 is the one who took us into the war in Iraq without having the intellectual curiosity to question the hype…most of it being created by himself and the ideologues in his Administration. He did not have the intellectual curiosity to reconsider the facts when Hans Blix was telling the Administration that their intelligence of where WMDs were didn’t seem to be checking out.
Well, I think his actions regarding 9/11 were a mixed bag. He did some good things (such as going to a mosque and trying to differentiate between thess particular people and Islam in general) and some not so good things (such as using the word “crusade”). The whole Afghanistan thing was pretty much what any President from either party would have done since you had to get pretty far out on the left before you found split opinions about taking such action. Some aspects of the Patriot Act were necessary but other parts of it were far too draconian, as were the detentions at Guantanamo and the subsequent attempts to get around international law on the treatment of prisoners that has culminated in what happened in the prison in Iraq.
And, in fact, to be honest, while 9/11 was a national tragedy, it is the sort of thing which is almost a no-lose situation for a politician. Just look at Giuliani who went from fairly widely reviled to people wanting to elect him to another term.
Still, I guess I would say that his reaction in the months following 9/11 was the highlight of his Presidency in that it wasn’t unambiguously bad like the rest of his presidency has been.
But I would like to acknowlege and apologize for a mistake I made. In one of my previous posts I wrote that pervert had said I wasn’t qualified to be President. Pervert responded by saying that he had never said this. He was correct and what I wrote was wrong. What happened was I began to write one thing, then started to change it, didn’t review my editing, and ended up saying something I hadn’t started out to say. While I disagree with the position pervert has taken over this issue I do not think he has made any personal attacks against myself or anyone else or in any other way acted in an offensive manner.
This thread was started on a particular topic and has surprisingly stayed relatively focused. There are numerous other threads on this board where people have discussed other aspects, pro and con, of President Bush’s leadership skills and decisions he has made.
The President is very often being filmed. I don’t think a significant number of people, if any, were watching the President on film live…Otherwise, I assume this film would have gotten more play by now. (You do remember that until Michael Moore put the film into his movie, almost nobody had seen it…I’d be curious if anyone here on the SDMB could say they saw it before Fahrenheit 9/11.)
That link was interesting.
I frankly find this squabble over seven minutes to be making a massive mountain over a pathetic molehill. So much of greater significance has happened since, focusing on this alleged gaffe is just plain weird, to me.
I do have one question mark: Cheney was physically dragged from his office like he was being bounced from a nightclub. Why didn’t somebody do the same with the POTUS? OK, maybe lifting him up like a potato sack an throwing him onto AF1 would have been a bit melodramatic, but the more I read, the more I’m just astonished that he could sit there, in public, in a school, where he was scheduled to be, and nobody lifted a finger to get him the hell out of there. Why this enormous disparity between the response at the White House, and the response at the Goat reading? Could the school not have been attacked? I mean, if somebody can fly a plane into the Pentagon, they sure could do some damage to a school. Yet while Cheney was getting hauled like a calf at a rodeo down into a bunker, Bush was left sitting alone in a decidedly less secure location.
Puzzling, to say the least, to me, anyway.
Why did you do that? Why didn’t you continue on with what you were doing?