Noooo…
I tell you what, though. I’ll admit that my indignation at the liberal incistence on refering to these 7 minutes as something more than a moment, or indicating something broader than they should is overblown, if you’ll admit that the reaction to the OP was also overblown. Just between us, no one else needs to know.
Like I said before, if it was clear that nothing was going to be found out for 7 minutes anyway, he was just fine sitting there. But that was not clear.
I’m sorry, the most important thing for a president do during an attack is to formulate a response to that attack. Projecting calm is good, but it can be done in other ways than not doing anything. By this logic, a 7 minute cat-nap might have been an ever better idea!
I wouldn’t call any president an “action hero” in any case. But to answer your question, I would not be happy with him hiding under a bed even if he didn’t spend the 7 minutes sitting. Avoiding the term “hero”, let’s say that leaving the room immediately by itself does not make his actions admirable. However, by not leaving the room he did do something wrong. Avoid doing anything wrong the whole day, and do some right stuff besides, then you got yourself a good leader. Right now, he’s got a flaw. A small flaw. But a flaw. Can we just acknowledge that it is a flaw, no matter how tiny?
I’ll agree with most of that, save perhaps the part about his character in general.
Well, let’s say does not make his behavior during those 7 minites admirable.
I have no problem agreeing that staying in the classroom was a flaw. I 'm not sure it was the best thing to do. But I’m only willing to do so if we agree that any flaw was tiny to the extreme. When information was available, when actions required presidential authority, when his actions were required, he stepped up and behaved admirably in my opinion. His insistance (see I can spell it) on making a brief statement from the school, His insistance on sleeping in the west wing, his directives to the national security apperatus later that day and in the days which followed were effective.
I can agree that the 7 minutes in questions are a flaw, as long as we can agree that focusing on them (to the point of not finding humor in Kerry’s 40 minutes) is also a flaw.
Note, I’m not saying that you have to agree with Bush’s foriegn policy decisions in the weeks following 9-11. Just that his actions that day and in the few days which followed should not be completely ignored.
Well, as long as you don’t say that those 7 minutes define his character, I’ll agree as well. I can accept that those 7 minutes are some sort of small indicator, or something. But they should not be considered in isolation nor out of context. Fair enough?
I hate to come back into the fray (particularly when it appears the fray is winding down), but Bush apparently commented on the 7 minutes on Larry King:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=584&e=2&u=/nm/20040813/pl_nm/campaign_bush_kerry_dc
Not to be a jerk about it or anything… but is he not saying that it took him those 7 minutes (from the time he was told “America is under attack” until he did anything) to “figure out we were at war”? If he’d stopped at “And I was collecting my thoughts,” his answer would have been okay… but then he had to further explain, and, well, wow.
Again, not a huge deal, but that answer is just terrible.
Is reading children’s stories one of his usual means of “collecting his thoughts”?
No, I don’t think so. I think that he is saying that during those 7 minutes he was mulling over options, or thinking about things. I don’t think it means that it took that long to figure out we were at war. Again, remember that he was in the classroom when he heard this news. It is not like he went into the classroom after finding out that America was under attack. It is certainly not like he was in the ready room and decided to go sit in a classroom when he found out.
One of the things I dislike about Bush (which I have alluded to but not defined) is the way he speaks. I simply cannot stand that he says nulular the way he does. However, I don’t think it is indicitave of feeblemindedness or anything like that. Similarly, I understand sitting in the classroom may not have been my choice, but it is not indicative of stupidity, or “lack of intellectual curiosity”. Both things are, as you say, not a huge deal.
Bill Maher gets it:
Sigh, no, he doesn’t.
But now that someone famous agrees with you maybe I should also? :rolleyes:
Er, what did he have to think about? He knew very very few details other than that someone was crashing airliners into buildings. For all he knew then, it was disgruntled airline pilots. Was he mulling over declaring war on them and bombing Iowa? What?
What he needed was to go do his job, which would have in part involved going to find out the details he would need to think and mull things over. That’s part of the reason that the fact that he could not, in hindsight, have done anything, is a non-issue. So what? He didn’t know that at the time. And he didn’t try to find out if there was something he could go do. He didn’t inquire. He instead waited patiently until someone told HIM what to do.
Please cite where he had been informed, before entering the classroom, that Boom #1 was part of a hostile attack.
If you can’t, you just lost that round.
Based on his not knowing anything about the attack other than it involved two planes into the two WTC towers. If Card came in and asked for an OK to launch missiles, how was he going to know whether or not it was warranted? Was he going to interrogate Card there in front of the kids? Even if he took it out into the hall, he would have been starting from essentially zero, rather than having had seven minutes to get some clue as to what was going on.
I don’t see how. His duty was to be Commander-in-Chief. You can’t command when you’re out of touch - when you have no information about the threat, and aren’t where you can tell your subordinates what to do, even if you knew what to tell them.
Given that he apparently believed a small private plane had gone off course and accidentally flown into the WTC, that wasn’t a very useful ‘talk’. Clearly if they’d indicated to him that America was under attack then, he should have cancelled his visit to the class before he went in to begin with, and his dereliction of duty is all the greater. But he didn’t, because he didn’t know that Boom #1 was part of something serious.
So the ‘update’ while there wasn’t so much an update as a whole new context: it wasn’t an accident, it was the first volley of an attack. And having found that out, it was time - immediately, not lackadaisically - to find out as much as he could, as soon as he could.
Why? He didn’t know in advance which moment would be the ‘unforgiving moment’ of military parlance.
Glad we’ve got that straight. Some people were still arguing to the contrary.
As I keep being told by Bush’s defenders, we can’t look at those seven minutes from hindsight and evaluate them on the basis of what we know now might or might not have been done with those minutes.
The key thing is that Bush, having no basis for knowing whether those moments were crucial, chose to sit them out.
I’ve listened, but haven’t heard much. And I can’t see why there’s an assumption on your part that President George W. Bush’s questions would have been any more frantic and out of place than those of Andy Card, his chief of staff. Hence the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ matter. It is you who seems to have lower expectations of Bush than of Card.
Other than the sheer inexplicability of it, of course.
If he’d had a sudden attack of diarrhea, and had to have been in the bathroom for seven minutes, I could have understood that. But he had no such excuse.
Certainly his people were busy finding things out. He wasn’t stoned, and he was only a short walk away. But until he took that walk, he had no clue whether the attacks were over, or whether there was more to come, and in what form - so he had no way of knowing what orders he might have to approve. He would have had to take it on faith that his subordinates brought him the right decisions to approve.
I’ve had bosses, and these days I am one, too. Good bosses aren’t just rubber stamps, at least not on the important stuff. And this ‘changed everything’, as we keep being told, so it was pretty damned important.
Once again, what did they tell him? Did they tell him we were under attack? Cite, please. Otherwise, game over.
Card: “We’re under attack.” Departs.
He wasn’t in communication for the seven minutes immediately after having been informed of the crisis. Before he went into the classroom, he didn’t know there was a crisis. Once Card stopped in, he did, but he knew almost nothing about it. And that’s when he didn’t bother to find out.
You keep saying this, without having presented a shred of evidence that he knew anything useful.
No, it doesn’t make it travel faster. It makes it travel, period.
Part of that was due to Rumsfeld having disappeared for most of the morning. And who besides the President could have given orders in place of the SecDef, if the SecDef was a no-show?
Maybe those seven minutes wouldn’t have enabled Bush to fill the hole left by Rumsfeld’s unexplained absence, but the reality is, you just don’t know beforehand. Those seven minutes maybe were, but probably weren’t, the unforgiving moment, a moment when actions could have been taken to save the Pentagon, or to not have to rely on the passengers of Flight 93 to be the ones to save the Capitol. But going into those seven minutes, Bush didn’t know that. But he knew he couldn’t begin to improve his understanding of the attack, he couldn’t make any decisions or give any orders, until he was with the people who could fill him in, who could relay those orders.
What, about planes flying at buildings? Once the skies were clear a few hours later, what was done, was done. He could take all the 7-minute breaks he wanted to, then.
Same old, same old. Saying it over and over again doesn’t back it up.
Indeed.
I’m sure he was deeply cogitating over the three pieces of information that he had: one plane had flown into one WTC tower, another plane had flown into the other tower, and it amounted to an attack of some sort. I can run rings around Dubya, intellectually speaking, but there’s nothing to be done with those three pieces of information until one gets more info.
In short, his seven minutes were totally wasted. Unless you can produce one shred of evidence that he knew additional facts during those seven minutes that would have actually given him something to cogitate about.
Only if his duty was to listen to the children read “The Pet Goat.” If his duty was to be learning about the attack on America in case it was continuing (which it was) and in case there might be some order only he could give to thwart the possibly ongoing attack (debatable, but possible), then he was not at his duty station, at a moment when time was quite possibly of the essence. What is dereliction of duty, if not this?
This is simply not true. I’m sorry, but again, and until you get it, he talked to his people before the classroom, recieved an update while there, and talked to them imediately after. He knew all this while he was in there. That is he knew he had talked to them, knew he had recieved an update, and knew that hid people were just outside the room to give him anything the could and to request of him anything they needed. He happened to be in the middle of someting, and chose to allow it to complete before going into the next room. There was nothing fundementally wrong with what he did.
No. Again, and until you get it, simply going into the next room would not have provided him with any data which required his imperitive attention. This was obvious from his position, because Card had not given him such. He did need to know about the second plane, and that everyone was pretty sure it was an attack rather than an accident, but he knew that at 9:05. That he took a few minutes to contemplate his situation is not a bad thing.
The point, and until you get it is that he knew this to a degree already. The point is that you cannot say he should have done something and then fail to present any reasonable actions.
Unless, of course you are joking. As in the OP, for instance. 
Amongst us monkeys, facial expressions are a dead give-away. If you were to show that video to any group of human beings, and ask them to characterize what they saw, bet yer ass the predominant opinion would be that here is a man who doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
What he most certainly does not look like is a cooly rational Leader of Men, calmly analyzing all the data. To make that plausible, you are reduced to constructing rationales, and insisting that simply because your rationale is not falsifiable, it must therefore be as plausible as the obvious: here is a guy with no clue, whatsoever, as what to do next.
I can accept that. My esteem for GeeDubya would go up 50 points if he were to look me in the eye and say “For ten minutes there, I had no fucking idea, 'luci. But I pulled myself together and got on with it”. But he doesn’t.
All MM pointed out with that clip is the obvious humanity. Which he denies, in order to preserve an illusion of wisdom and leadership.
Feh.
From Maher:
Nah, this day had been planned for centuries by an alien race, who cunningly planted the facts Bush would need to lead the nation in the pages of “The Pet Goat”.
pervert - let’s look at the day backwards, but in a slightly different way: once it was clear that the immediate attack was over - once all air traffic had been grounded, and there were no apparent attacks not involving planes - then Bush can take a nice, long nap on AF1 - however long he needs, or until an aide wakes him up - and he passes the test, as long as he’s there and trying to get the facts, and make the right decisions, while events are unfolding.
But while the crisis is unfolding, and the action is minute-to-minute, then the commander needs to be present and involved. If he’s not, who needs a commander?
Nice job following up a denial with nonsense.
Yes, it WAS true. He knew very little other than what I said. For all he knew, it really COULD have been disgruntled airline pilots attacking America. His briefing told him little other than what had happened: plane crashes. The “update” was Card telling him that a second plane had crashed and that we were under attack. At that point, Bush still knew almost nothing. And he chose to remain that way.
What is he now, the butler?
Happened to be in the middle of something?! Excuse me while your mother chokes to death on a ham sandwich, I’m IN THE MIDDLE OF POSTING THIS MESSAGE.
He had no clue whether or not this was true, and it most certainly was NOT true. There was all sorts of additional data already about what the various agencies and departments were doing. A leader might have been on top of all of that, then suddenly realized from putting it all together that various things needed to be done differently. A leader might have conferred with his people to get their advice on what he should do, ASAP. But Bush wasn’t part of any of that discussion. He chose to sit it out, remaining uninformed as to whether anything required his attention. (and before you try it again: figuring out whether there is something he can do is ALSO a judgement call that the President, as a leader, should not be leaving up to other people).
The only thing that’s obvious is that Card couldn’t have had the discussion with Bush right then and there. Card did, in fact, know a lot more than what he whisphered in Bush’s ear. More facts about when and how this was happening. More facts about what connections the team in the school had to outside world and how fast they could do various things. There is a world of information crucial to leadership that Bush chose not to enter, utterly inexplicably.
Of course it is, because he had no way of knowing what was going on, what was being done, if the situation was still going on with other attacks (it was), and if things were working correctly. He didn’t even know what his staff were discussing or what information they additionally had, or if they could get any, because he chose not to inquire.
Instead of going off-message in response to a new situation, he stayed on message, on the photo-op.
How about standing up and walking over to where the information and action was? Is that so hard?
No, it wasn’t.
This is not true either. You do not have a full accounting of the conversation which occured before the schoolroom, and there are things which are reasonable to assume from what happened.
No, I really don’t think so. This would have been a totally unreasonable assumption.
That we know of for sure. There was certainly more detail than this. Also, there was simply little else to know. I realize you guys keep saying Bush had not way to know this, but this is not true.
What?
Once again, you take the school meeting out of context. I did not mean that he was in the middle of something more important. I simply meant that it was not like he was about to make a command decision and decided instead to sit down.
Yes it was in terms of real information. It was definately true in terms of coherent data gathered by his National Security people. This information was not available until well after 10:00. Gathere without Bush in the room, BTW, and communicated to him as soon as it was available. To say he had no way to know this is to assume he did not how his staff worked. You can certainly assume this at the start if you want, but you can’t use this assumption to prove itself.
Now this is an assertion we can sink out teeth into. Can you point to the paragraph in the 9-11 commission report which confirms this?
But again, this is not true. At the very least it is not a fari characterization. And even to the extent that it might be accurate, it was only so for 7 minutes.
No, and again, I have no problem with the proposal that staying in the classroom was a mistake, or at the very least not the best thing to do. But it certainly was not a case of “a world of information crucial to leadership that Bush chose not to enter”
But this is exactly backwards. It is not the president’s job to order individual fighters, or to make phone calls to air traffic controllers. It is his job to set policy. It is after the attack has died down that policy can be discussed. This is the time that the President needs to begin planning a response. Oddly enough, that’s what Bush did.
I find this hard to believe. Can you give me a cite for such an assertion? Something like a study linking facial expressions to internal states?
Of course not! Can you please point to a single post of mine or any other which suggested that this is the case?
No, he says “Gathering my thoughts”. Can you explain the difference?
No, what MM tried to do is demonize him. An equally illogical proposition to he one you erroneously attributed to Bush supporters.
This is from that bastion of liberal journalism, the Wall Street Journal (linked from another source, as registration is required at the WSJ):
So, 48 minutes after understanding that this is not a fluke, and that we’re actually under attack, he begins to make major decisions. One more plane crashed during that interlude, while another hadn’t yet. At that time, there were concerns that up to 11 planes were suspect and could be involved. I, for one, feel much better that he was busy projecting calm during that period as opposed to finding out the facts or making any decisions.
I agree wholeheartedly. But while he doesn’t order individual fighters, setting policy - on this paticular morning - includes the decision of whether to shoot down airliners.
NORAD had no pre-existing policies for what to do if people hijacked planes and flew them into buildings. He was going to have to create those policies, on the spot, by the seat of his pants.
Unfortunately, the seat of his pants was in a desk in a classroom, while he was briefed in detail by elementary-school children oncerning the content of “The Pet Goat.”
By this standard, the time for him to come up with a policy for his subordinates to respond to the events of the morning of 9/11 was earlier in the year. Shall we examine that record? He claims to have ordered the infamous August 6 PDB as a result of the threats to the G-7 summit in Italy in July, where high on the list of
anticipated threats was that of terrorists…flying planes into buildings!
So he made policy to deal with this, how? By ordering a briefing summarizing what we knew. (“Bin Laden Determined To Attack United States.”) The August 6 PDB made specific mention of New York and Washington as targets, and specific mention of plane hijackings. And the policies he instituted were…?
Oops.
So he didn’t make policy before 9/11, therefore it was an absolute necessity that he be available to make policy as required during that awful morning. Otherwise, there would be no policy, for no one else had the authority to make policy to respond to this attack. NORAD could scramble planes on its own authority, but someone else had to make the decision to try to shoot down a plane, and only George W. Bush, the President of the United States, had that authority. He had not delegated it to anyone ahead of time.
Also, he was likely the only one with authority to order Rumsfeld tracked down, or to choose someone else to act as Secretary of Defense during Rumsfeld’s puzzling absence. I’m willing to put down money that Andy Card didn’t have that authority on his own, and Dick Cheney didn’t have that authority on his own. When did Bush realize there was no SecDef on duty? This is part of being in command during a crisis: simply knowing whether your key subordinates are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and doing something about it if they’re not. Bush didn’t speak to Rumsfeld until roughly 10 a.m., yet the order to shoot down a plane would have had to go through the SecDef.
So there was plenty for Bush to do. Clearly he wasted a lot of time that morning, after Andy Card told him we were under attack - first, staring into space for seven minutes, then apparently being mostly involved, not in what the FAA and NORAD knew, and what orders might have to be given, but in discussing what he would say to the American people about the attack, and having his picture taken.
I remember hearing that first statement over the radio. (No TV in my office.) It referred to the attack in the past tense, as if it was over - and then, a few minutes later, Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon.
If he had been on the job, rather than wasting time, he might have been aware of the possiblity that the attack was still ongoing.
pervert, I have come to the conclusion that you don’t actually believe what you are arguing for, and are just being contrarian. Your arguments make no sense (" To say he had no way to know this is to assume he did not how his staff worked."???), they just constitute flat denials and an incoherent way to fill space after those denials. The President did not have much information to mull over: he needed more. It was available, not necessarily everything about the situation, but details coming in all the time about things that should concern a President. He declined to seek any of it. Declined to try and take on his role as a leader in a crisis. You’ve raised absolutely nothing in contradiction to these arguments other than unsupported denials. Your entire case rests upon the extremely dubious assumption that there was litterally nothing in particular for Bush to be doing for those 7 minutes: not even finding out more information about the sitaution or finding out what his staff were doing in response to it. A leader doesn’t just let his staff figure everything out and then tell him what to do. That’s what a figurehead does.
How is it not true? Did Card insert a data device into Bush’s ear with his tongue when he whispered to him?