Better than asking what was going on? Seriously? When the rest of the country was starting to realize the country was under attack, it was better that the President do his photo-op with the schoolkids than - forget even getting information - start figuring out a way to address the nation? You know, acting Presidential? Or finding out if there was anything he could do? Asking who attacked us, or if there was further risk?
The point was that they would have gotten the info to BUSH quicker, the leader who is supposed to make decisions on that info. Not that they would have gotten it quicker to themselves.
And no, I don’t think it made any difference, at least not in that emergency. But a better leader would have tried to get that info quicker, in case time was actually an issue.
If he had been sitting in his office reading “My Pet Goat” rather than getting up to speed on the situation, then no, there would not have been any difference.
The issue is not where he was, but rather that as Commander and Chief, he burried his head in the sand.
You know, it occurs to me that this is the ultimate partisan issue.
Bush haters conflate this thing to demonize Bush into something evil or incompetent, and Bush supporters contort and twist to ignore the fact that he have could done better.
Both extremes are silly. He simply could have done better, and had the misfortune of being on camera at the time. Making it worse than it is or somehow arguing he did the completely right thing are equally ridiculous.
Haters, just admit that a few minutes didn’t make any difference.
Bushies, stop denying that he couldn’t have been quicker to get on the situation.
It really doesn’t have to be black and white, you know.
pervert: I kind of think you are being a bit purposely obtuse here. I think I made it pretty clear that I expected him to engage his brain to find out what was going on. He could have asked what was known about these planes that hit the buildings…Had they been hijacked and were there other planes that appeared to be hijacked? Were there any other likely targets that need to be evacuated? What are the plans for him from here on out…And what is the status of Dick Cheney and those on down the line of command for the Presidency?
But, hell, he could have just gone into another room and asked them to turn on CNN so he could see what was being reported? When my friend, who was going to fly out to Europe that day to visit her grandmother called me and tearfully told me what was going on, I immediately left down the office and walked down the hall and stopped in some room that had a TV and watched for a few minutes, then walked out to my car and turned on NPR and listened to that for a while. Even though I couldn’t do anything, I had an immediate hunger to know what the hell was going on. And, I don’t go around telling anyone that I am a great leader and they should trust me in a crisis, so to be honest, I expect more from the President in such a situation than a do from myself. As I noted, I am more of the deliberative type who would want to be in the Senate or on the Supreme Court if I were in a political position of power.
But, again, I don’t think that people would be making much of a deal about this if it weren’t so symbolic of what we see as a major character flaw in the President, as regards a lack of intellectual curiosity and attempt to seriously understand a situation. It is sort of analogous to the big deal that was made in regards to his father being amazed by supermarket checkout scanners. On a sort of intellectual level, we could understand that Bush Sr. was leading a necessarily sheltered existence in some ways being Vice President and all…After, all you can’t just walk into the neighborhood supermarket when you are Vice President. However, it was symbolic of the fact that he seemed so out-of-touch with the real world that people face. I mean, I remember how overjoyed I was when Clinton said the words “pre-existing condition”…It was just the fact that he was intellectually engaged with the problems that some ordinary Joe would face in dealing with health care that was absent in Bush Sr.'s Administration (which I nonetheless look back with quite a bit of nostalgia in comparison to Bush Jr’s).
A number of people have said that. It positively didn’t matter. As I’ve said earlier, he still shouldn’t have sat there.
He could have asked what the heck Card meant by “The nation is under attack.”
He could have asked where the nearest TV was.
He could have asked any number of questions.
See, that’s the problem. He didn’t ask anyone anything. He had no curiousity about what was happening.
Our candidate wasn’t Commander-in-Chief. Our candidate wasn’t in a position to do anything that would affect the country. Our candidate wasn’t sitting around doing something trivial and unrelated while all this was going on, after he knew it was going on.
Our candidate was WATCHING TV TO SEE WHAT WAS GOING ON, like most of the rest of the country.
I do wish Americans could have had a live Picture-in-Picture, to see what Bush was doing.
Good post. They also can’t come out and admit that Bush has zero curiousity. Amazing.
Btw, it was a lot more than 7 minutes Bush was in that classroom after finding out the second plane had hit. He stayed there until all the press had left. This is from An Interesting Day, an in-depth effort to try and account for Bush’s actions that day.
Exactly.
Only one candidate had not only the ability but the obligation to do anything.
Whether Bush could have made a difference in that seven minutes is beside the point. He didn’t know he couldn’t make a difference. He should have tried regardless. There was no good reason for him to sit there and every reason to get off his ass and leave. The Bush entourage had already set up a workroom in an adjoining classroom. Bush could have excused himself politely (and btw, who gives a crap if he would have scared the kids? Let 'em be scared. They’ll get over it) and walked a few feet into a room that was already equipped with telephines, computers, Secret Service and various, assorted Bush aides and babysitters. Wsa that two foot in the hallway from one room to another really such a desperate risk?
If I may trivialize this with a baseball analogy, it’s like failing to hustle down to first base on a weak groundball to short. It probably won’t make any difference, but your supposed to leg it out anyway. Every once in a while a fielder kicks the ball or sails it over the first baseman’s head. When the ball is in play, you run. The ball was in play and it took seven minutes for Bush to leave first base. He acted like the special ed kid who takes an at bat and then everybody has to keep telling him what base to go to.
Oh…and pointing at Kerry is like pointing at the on deck guy and wondering why he didn’t hustle to first.
Perhaps he could have made inquiries that would have told him that another plane had been hijacked. According to the 9/11 Commission report, he did not know that any more than the first two planes had been hijacked as of the time that he eventually left the school (approximately 9:30 a.m.). Perhaps he might have communicated with the Pentagon, something which he did not do.
Perhaps because of inquiries that he might have made, information about the other hijackings and directives to secure the cockpit would have made it to the crew of flight 93 more than the 2 minutes before the hijackers acted, as it did. I realize that this is the sheerest of speculation, but he could have issued an order that all flight crews be immediately informed about what had happened to other planes.
From the 9/11 Commission Report, page 11
Bush had been told that the country was under attack by hijacked airplanes 23 minutes sooner. Bush had been told about what was going on 14 minutes before a flight dispatcher took it upon himself to inform United planes about what was going on. What if the crew had even a “mere seven minutes,” or even more, to prepare themselves?
I don’t blame Bush for not giving that specific order, but I do blame him for doing absolutely nothing but preparing a speech for half an hour.
I reiterate that to claim that Bush “didn’t know” everything is begging the question. He didn’t know what he didn’t know, and he made no attempt to find out.
For those who would apologize for Bush, I would ask you this. If someone had come up to you that day and said simply “Two airplanes have hit the World Trade Center. America is under attack,” would you simply shrug and be satisfied with that information. Would you finish your sandwich or watch the end of a Spongebob Squarepants episode before you you sought more information.
Or would you say something more along the lines of “Who the fuck the what…?”
Bush had no idea what was going on and didn’t ask a single question. Isn’t that exceedingly odd?
By contrast, Kerry’s own “inactivity” such as it was, at least involved watching the tube and finding out information. He wanted to know what the hell was going on. That in itself is still more than Bush did.
Y’know, I rather would have liked the inert, blinking Bush. If only he could have spent the next year or so sitting and pondering goats, rather than slapping together a bunch of spurious intelligence and using the flimsy evidence as justification for invading a country that had no WMDs or Al Quaeda operatives in it.
Moore has his priorities all wrong. A Bush governs best when he governs least.
In those first 7 minutes? Yes. Imagine the answers to those question in those first 7 minutes. Which one would have made any difference? Do you really think that a president moving from aide to aide asking “what do we know now?” would have been anything except an impediment? Seriously?
I have not been one that has been quick to criticize Bush’s reaction. But watching those seven minutes played out in the movie did give me pause.
Surely there was some general plan of action to take in the event that the United States came under attack. Although no one could foresee the specific nature of the attack, I would think that contingency plans of some sort would have been in place. I don’t think those plans would have included a photo op. That makes me wonder what the actual plans were.
You and I have the right to remain frozen in place and I can even understand Bush’s initial reaction for a minute or two. But I can’t imagine for a moment that a John Kennedy, or a Bill Clinton or a Dwight Eisenhower wouldn’t have started asking lots of questions. They would have known what questions to ask. They would have been prepared for that by their intellects.
George Bush did not come across as calm or confident that morning – not to me, anyway. He just looked frozen like the rest of us. I think that we have the right to expect that the Commander-in-Chief will have a better command of the situation than you or I.
Is it true that he had to use a regular cell phone in the limo to communicate?
And what would that have accomplished? Seriously. In those first 7 minutes, what could he have done to learn more than he had?
Yes, and during those 7 minutes, he could have been told “We don’t know just yet, we’re working on it.”
But again, you were not the president. For you to stop what you were doing drop everything and panic (ok, not panic, but act fearful) had no consequences whatsoever. If you had been president you would have spent a few minutes gathering your thoughts. Most likely, you would have done so off camera. This, in the end, is the difference.
Yes, but this is a characterization which you have added to the facts. It is not the biggest stretch in the world, but it is, in the end, more a criticism of Bush than a criticism of what happened.
Yes, yes it is. And just as stupid, if you’ll excuse the language.
And again, I’ll ask you, what would the answers have been? What difference would the answers have made? Is there no room in your philosophy for letting people do their jobs?
No, not at all. :rolleyes:
Or, he sat there and allowed his people to find out what was going on.
Not only not repulsive, admirable. <Now whatch the fur fly;)>
Again, I’ll ask you, try what? What should he have wanted to try?
Just to repeat myself, how about:
Q: “Have all the planes in the air been informed about the situation?”
A: “No.”
Yea, except they would not have. What info did they have that they did not get to the President? Info, mind you, not rumors or anything else.
Really? A better leader would not have trusted his people enough to allow them 7 minutes to gather the necessary information that it could be presented in a coeherent manner? I’m not talking about waiting to build a power point brief, just a lousy 7 minutes. I’m not sure you could make 3 phone calls in that time. Not and get any decent information at that point in the morning.
This last bit is an assumption that you guys make because he did not ask the question you would have wanted (with hindsight) him to ask. This, ladies and gentlemen is the problem with the whole argument. It is why the OP is funny. It is why your visceral reaction to the OP is funny. It is why you do not get the joke.
But this makes a difference in his “intellectual curiosity”?
The job of the aides is to (dig this) AIDE the President. They are supposed to provide him with information. You’re telling me if he’d asked them to give him some information, he’d have been an impediment? How? They could have just turned on the radio, which woke me up damn quick with the news at 9:32, or they could have pointed him to a TV, which I bet is where I was by 9:33. Shit, I was just sitting at home and I immediately asked an aide [in this case my mother, who is unpaid for her work] ‘have you seen this?’ ‘what’s going on?’
Things President Bush could have done when informed of the terrorist attacks:
- Protected himself, the most important person in the chain of command, by leaving a public area, and heading to Air Force 1.
- Asked questions of his advisers including: Are there other planes involved? Who’s doing this? Can we rescue any people in the WTC? What alert level are our armed forces at? Is the chain of command intact? Is Cheney OK? Are Laura and the kids OK?
- Made orders to raise the level of readiness of the armed forces, including perhaps raising the Defcon level, ordering extra airport security, or scrambling fighter planes.
- Made himself ready if someone should request that he make an order only the President could make, such as the order to shoot down a civilian aeroplane.
All he would have to do would be to politely and calmly excuse himself from the classroom. Noone would think any less of him for cutting short an unimportant photo op.
These steps probably wouldn’t have made a difference (apart from Hentor’s scenario), but he did not know this at the time. For all he knew, terrorists were about to crash a plane into the school where he was reading.
He is the commander-in-chief, and he was unable to fulfil his duties while sitting in the classroom. What if he were the captain of a warship that had come under sudden attack? Would it be acceptable for the captain to remain in a routine meeting for another half-hour, or should he calmly but quickly head to the bridge to see what was going on?