# My Pet Goat reading
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [August 27, 2013, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279 "2013-08-27T04:35:02Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 3
### Author:  [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2013, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/41 "2013-08-27T20:31:26Z")
> [@MaxTheVool](#):
>
> . . . What I found so infuriating about the issue at the time was that the Bush supporters (and back in 2004 there WERE Bush supporters, crazy though that seems) seemed unwilling to say “yeah, that was not his finest moment… he kinda choked. But really, it’s not a big deal”, which would have mollified me. . . .
FWIW, most of the Bush supporters I knew at the time took that line. That, and the following mix-up regarding which air base to fly to, indicated that he was indecisive and confused. At the time, I didn’t hear anybody say how much more important it was not to scare twenty-some children rather than act to defend the nation. Everybody I heard, at the time, acknowledged that he had frozen up.
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### Author:  [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2013, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/42 "2013-08-27T20:32:22Z")
> [@Werekoala](#):
>
> See the fact that the President has a staff of hundreds - the Administration is not one man, and the Administration was not “doing nothing” during those 7 minutes.
Leave the goalposts right where they are, thank you. We are talking about the actions of the President at that time, not the actions of his entire administration. Please point out where anyone in this thread, or any of the previous threads on this subject, has said that they wished the president had leapt up or panicked.
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### Author:  [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2013, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/43 "2013-08-27T20:34:01Z")
> [@MaxTheVool](#):
>
> IWhat I found so infuriating about the issue at the time was that the Bush supporters (and back in 2004 there WERE Bush supporters, crazy though that seems) seemed unwilling to say "yeah, that was not his finest moment… he kinda choked.
Crazy as it seems, here in 2013 I am still a Bush supporter, and would vote for him were he running today.
But that doesn’t require me to support everything he ever did. That was not his finest moment.
Part of the problem here is probably that while you yourself may have taken the position that it’s not a huge deal, the atmosphere here generally is that Bush is a complete idiot, and criticism of his actions and policies generally fall along those lines, either explicitly or implicitly. You yourself, in your OP, said as your first point that you didn’t think it was a big deal, but you alone can’t isolate yourself from the atmophere on this board. And things sometimes are - or seem - defensible in that context that wouldn’t be defensible otherwise.
[I should also note that there are also some liberal opponents of Bush who also said there was nothing wrong with his response, so it was not just pure partisanship.]
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### Author:  [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2013, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/44 "2013-08-27T20:47:06Z")
> [@Fotheringay-Phipps](#):
>
> Crazy as it seems, here in 2013 I am still a Bush supporter, and would vote for him were he running today.
>
> But that doesn’t require me to support everything he ever did. That was not his finest moment.
>
> Part of the problem here is probably that while you yourself may have taken the position that it’s not a huge deal, the atmosphere here generally is that Bush is a complete idiot, and criticism of his actions and policies generally fall along those lines, either explicitly or implicitly. You yourself, in your OP, said as your first point that you didn’t think it was a big deal, but you alone can’t isolate yourself from the atmophere on this board. And things sometimes are - or seem - defensible in that context that wouldn’t be defensible otherwise.
>
> [I should also note that there are also some liberal opponents of Bush who also said there was nothing wrong with his response, so it was not just pure partisanship.]
So… what’s your response to the argument **Werekoala** makes in post #36 in this thread?
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### Author:  [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2013, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/45 "2013-08-27T20:54:53Z")
> [@MaxTheVool](#):
>
> So… what’s your response to the argument **Werekoala** makes in post #36 in this thread?
If he was already fully apprised of all that was known at the time, and had issued directives as to what direction things should go in from that point (which could possibly be “let’s wait for further information”) and had made arrangements that he be notified as events unfolded, then he’d be OK going back to whatever he was doing. I mean, he intended to sleep and eat at some point as well.
But if he was told there was an apparent terrorist attack on the WTC and just said “OK thanks, now back to the goat …” then he was not showing leadership and taking charge of the situation. As others have noted here, it was not clear at the time what might be required of him.
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2013, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/46 "2013-08-27T21:03:08Z")
The book was actually called “The Pet Goat,” by the way. I know this changes everything.
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### Author:  [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2013, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/47 "2013-08-27T21:19:56Z")
> [@Hentor\_the\_Barbarian](#):
>
> In addition, they could have done something. There was still time to save one of the planes, if they had instructed the crews sooner.
But that’s irrelevant to this question - the “they” who could have instructed the crews sooner wouldn’t have included Bush.
> [@Little\_Nemo](#):
>
> And for all Bush knew, the terrorists might have known his location and the Booker Elementary School might have had a plane flying towards it as he sat there and read his book.
Or, more likely based on the info they had at the time, there were snipers waiting outside the school to shoot him in the ensuing chaos if they rushed him out of the building without making proper preparations.
When the Pres makes visits like this, there are hundreds of people involved in planning every little detail of moving him around. He should have excused himself and gone into conference with his aides immediately. But he didn’t. It’s almost obvious to me that Bush was in the mode of following around his planners, going where they told him to go and when. He was advised there was an attack, the planners started preparing to get him out of there sooner than they had expected to, but they weren’t ready yet, give them a few more minutes to line things up. Bush did as he was told and went back to reading the book.
He didn’t take charge, he did what he was told. Is anyone surprised by that? For God’s sake, this wasn’t LBJ, it was GWB.
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### Author:  [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2013, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/48 "2013-08-27T22:07:01Z")
> [@Fotheringay-Phipps](#):
>
> If you ask me, I don’t think presidents should go about reading books to classrooms of schoolchildren ever.
Some presidents might do less damage reading books to children than trying to run the country.
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### Author:  [@Hentor\_the\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hentor_the_Barbarian)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2013, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/49 "2013-08-27T23:12:56Z")
> [@CurtC](#):
>
> But that’s irrelevant to this question - the “they” who could have instructed the crews sooner wouldn’t have included Bush.
This makes no sense. The point is that it didn’t happen in time.
Would Bush have thought to suggest it within seven minutes? Probably not. The point is that it was possible. And that is **entirely** relevant to the assertion that nothing could have been done differently if he hadn’t frozen.
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### Author:  [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2013, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/50 "2013-08-28T00:13:41Z")
> [@CurtC](#):
>
> Or, more likely based on the info they had at the time, there were snipers waiting outside the school to shoot him in the ensuing chaos if they rushed him out of the building without making proper preparations.
That’s just silly. The info they had at the time was that a terrorist group were blowing up buildings by crashing vehicles into them. There were no reports of snipers killing people. The President was inside a vulnerable building. So the smart thing would be to move the President out of the building and get him to a secure location.
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### Author:  [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2013, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/51 "2013-08-28T00:15:21Z")
I believe that Bush, in time, proved himself to be a terrible leader. But his decision to continue to read to school kids for 7 extra minutes was not a contributing factor to my analysis of him.
If, instead of reading, he stepped out for a smoke or to clear his head, that’s equally valuable to assessing a thentofore unknown situation. Just as good as yapping away at others who don’t know what in the hell is going on. I don’t think that there is a textbook “correct” decision there. And the point about not scaring the kids or looking bad on TV is also a good one.
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### Author:  [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2013, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/52 "2013-08-28T00:21:45Z")
> [@Marley23](#):
>
> The book was actually called “The Pet Goat,” by the way. I know this changes everything.
Actually, the book is titled _Reading Mastery II: Storybook 1_. As you can guess from the title, it’s a textbook. “The Pet Goat” is a story in that book.
Apparently a lot of people tried to find a copy of a book titled _The Pet Goat_ after it became famous and found it doesn’t exist. Instant conspiracy theory.
And it gets worse. The book’s author, Siegfried Engelmann, not only has a foreign sounding name but he is also a self-professed hard-core liberal. He was also born in Chicago and has a goatee. He even spent time in a foreign country (he spent a year teaching in Canada).
Clearly this book was a liberal trap, deliberately written to ensnare the President.
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### Author:  [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2013, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/53 "2013-08-28T01:18:52Z")
> [@jtgain](#):
>
> Just as good as yapping away at others who don’t know what in the hell is going on.
Except that even if no one else knew what the hell was going on, there were any number of people he could talk to who had background knowledge about terrorism, airliners, and any number of other relevant topics.
Like I’ve said a million times, it’s not a big deal on the scale of thing Bush did. But those 7 minutes were a mistake, a bad thing, a blunder, a bad move, a negative. If someone is asked to grade Bush’s performance during those 7 minutes, Bush should clearly get a bad grade. That is, to me, 100% inarguably crystal clear, in a way that very very few issues are. And thus, when, back in 2004, a bunch of Bush supporters disputed that, in some fairly preposterously silly ways (ie, “gosh, if he’d left the room it would have PANICKED THE KIDS!!!”) it really got my goat. Hehe, goat.
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### Author:  [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2013, 10:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/54 "2013-08-28T10:06:43Z")
> [@Marley23](#):
>
> The book was actually called “The Pet Goat,” by the way. I know this changes everything.
I find the persistent error in calling it _My Pet Goat_ to be the most annoying aspect of the incident.
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### Author:  [@Learjeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Learjeff)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2013, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/55 "2013-08-28T17:24:20Z")
> [@simster](#):
>
> I’m not going to debate this - but you grossly overestimate the importance of 5 minutes at that particular point in time AND your using knowledge that was not available at the time as your reasoning. Even though the second crash clearly implied that ‘something bigger was going on’ - the entire event was unprecedented. We simply did not know that “we were under attack” at that moment.
The president was told that we were under attack. What’s the proper response? Simple: start gathering information. Bush delayed that by 7 minutes.
When I see a defense of this, I have to conclude the defenders are either apologists for Bush or else seriously lack good judgment.
Was it a big deal? No, but it might have been.
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### Author:  [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2013, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/56 "2013-08-28T17:58:29Z")
> [@Learjeff](#):
>
> The president was told that we were under attack. What’s the proper response? Simple: start gathering information. Bush delayed that by 7 minutes.
>
> When I see a defense of this, I have to conclude the defenders are either apologists for Bush or else seriously lack good judgment.
>
> Was it a big deal? No, but it might have been.
:rolleyes:
The president does not gather information and, unless he has loaded his administration, (and the military and the FBI and The CIA and the NSA, etc.), with utterly incompetent fools, he has no need to explain to his staff what information to gather. When I see someone making a big deal about seven entire minutes reading a prepared text to a gathered audience, I have to conclude that the attackers are so utterly partisan that they would condemn Bush for curing cancer.
Was it a big deal? No–no “buts.”
Was his apparent “freezing” a glowing moment in his presidency? Of course, not. However, that “freezing” is still the subjective opinion of people who can only project their own beliefs onto his facial expressions, not a serious examination of his actual thoughts. (Had he blurted out something dumb, like “_Where can I hide?_” or "_Give me the launch codes for a nuke strike on Baghdad!_"we would have something more than projection with which to work. We don’t)
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### Author:  [@Hentor\_the\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hentor_the_Barbarian)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2013, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/57 "2013-08-28T18:57:58Z")
Well, that’s extraordinarily poor reasoning. I’m a bit shocked.
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### Author:  [@ricksummon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ricksummon)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2013, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/58 "2013-08-28T19:45:30Z")
If 7 minutes wasn’t a big deal — how long _would_ have been? If Bush had been scheduled to spend the entire school day with the Panic Kids™ and had decided to stick with that schedule, I think even Cheney would have invoked Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, followed very shortly by Bush’s resignation.
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### Author:  [@simster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/simster)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2013, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/59 "2013-08-28T19:49:21Z")
> [@Learjeff](#):
>
> The president was told that we were under attack. What’s the proper response? Simple: start gathering information. Bush delayed that by 7 minutes.
>
> When I see a defense of this, I have to conclude the defenders are either apologists for Bush or else seriously lack good judgment.
>
> Was it a big deal? No, but it might have been.
Cite for specifically what the president was told in his ear at that specific time?
I don’t think anyone - not even the presidents TOP MEN - knew it was an orchestrated ATTACK at that time - they did know that a second plane had crashed and that something definitely was wrong and looking …
anyway - tomndebb also addressed this - but while the President may issue orders, directives, etc - he has lots of other people doing his ‘fact gathering’ - and very little was actively known AT THAT MOMENT.
And FTR - I am not an apologist for Bush and I think I have better judgement then most - While I think he could have handled it differently - and I think I may have handled it differently - I have no qualms with how he did handle it.
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### Author:  [@simster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/simster)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2013, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-pet-goat-reading/667279/60 "2013-08-28T20:06:18Z")
Based on this page - [Timeline for the day of the September 11 attacks - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_for_the_day_of_the_September_11_attacks)
the 9:05 entry does state that the word “attack” was used.
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