Remember Bush was not in charge. 9/11 is the prime example.
and I think the real terrorists are at large.
visit; www.ae911truth.org/
for more.
But wouldn’t doing that have panicked the children? How could Bush have been so callous as to endanger the mental health of an entire roomful of innocents merely to rush to his wife’s side when he couldn’t have done anything anyway? 
You know, I think I’ve figured this “panic” thing out here. The word “panic” comes from the Greek god Pan, who is half-man and half-goat. Clearly, if the President had cut the story short, Pan would have been offended at the disrespect shown to his favored animal and struck the children with his curse.
OK, one more time just for the hell of it. I’ll be going out for the holiday and won’t get back here any time soon.
I admit I’m not a Bush fan; far from it. I do at least give him credit for his AIDS initiatives in Africa. Funny, right now I can’t think of a single other thing to give him credit for. Perhaps I’ve forgotten something. But in objective fact, I suspect that’s more a sad reality of his presidency than a commentary on my partisanship. Still though, the incident under discussion is like a toothpick to a redwood in comparison to Bush’s other failings. Hell, it’s like a toothpick to a whole forest of General Sherman trees compared just to Iraq. But the absolute magnitude of the fuck-up doesn’t change the fact that it was a fuck-up.
I’m an executive. (A small one, certainly; nothing like the CEO of GM, let alone the POTUS. But some comparison is apt.) I have a competent staff that handles many matters independently, researches issues for me, and even prepares me via both briefing and advice for actions and decisions I must make. But I am not a figurehead or ceremonial leader. When there’s a crisis, it is my role – it is my duty – to take charge. Leaving my staff to their own devices when a novel problem arises is a major disservice to them, and to the organization we all serve. That’s why I get the big bucks. (I wish! Oh, how I wish! ;))
So I – and apparently the rest of the Bush critics in this thread – do not condemn him because we feel that earlier action on his part might have produced a different outcome. I (we?) condemn him because his role and his duty required him to immediately take on the role of leader, ‘Decider in Chief’, or more formally Commander in Chief. And instead of immediately assuming that role — for seven minutes that, by the grace of whatever deity or lack of same you care to invoke or deny, 7 minutes that turned out not to have been critically important ALTHOUGH NO ONE, LEAST OF ALL BUSH, COULD HAVE KNOWN THAT AT THE TIME — while his staff and the rest of the country were reeling in shock at what everyone with a TV knew to be the largest attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor, he was sitting in a half pint chair in an elementary classroom, intoning in his best Presidential manner “Nice empathetic reading Susan! You really made me feel what it is like to be a pet goat”. (No direct comparison declared or implied; no insult intended to Susan or the goat; your mileage may vary.)
Dan, you probably won’t see this, but great post. Enjoy your vacation.
That’s an extraordinarily cynical view of the presidents job. I will concede that a lot of what a president does is based on this calculus, probably too much; but I still like to think (hope) that when the shit really hits the fan, a president’s actuons are not as calculated for image purposes as you assert here. I do believe there is some room for actual leadership, for “profiles in courage”, etc. I would point out that the president we are discussing here went against the wishes of most of the rank-and-file in his party when he supported TARP; similarly, the current president will most likely take military action against Syria against the wishes of most of the rank-and-file of his party. In both cases I think they were/are doing the right thing even when it is not the politically easy thing to do.
In any event, though, if Bush was trying to do the best thing for the image of the presidency or himself, “sitting in a half pint chair” while Americans watched the towers burn was not it. If as you believe the presidency is mainly about politics and not so much about executive, hands-on leadership, he still should have been pretending to assert executive, hands-on leadership.
Maybe the goat story was Bush’s Breaking Bad, and he literally couldn’t tear himself away until it was over.
And in that very same Tom Clancy book, the Secret Service agents on the roof of the Capitol Building whip out a MANPADS and shoot at the incoming jumbo jet.
Yes I do believe the Secret Service anticipates airborne threats, even back in 2001. It would be a profound professional failure if they were disregarding potential threats from the sky.
Bush is a fool and I can easily believe he sat there for seven minutes drooling while his advisers worked up the courage to say “Hey boss, we got things, ya know?” But I would also be willing to bet the Secret Service was doing a perimeter check at the same time and those seven minutes weren’t entirely wasted. Perhaps I’ve just seen too many movies (Salt, RED) in which an important political figure is attacked after a bomb or other distraction forces them to move. But that stuff only happens in the movies I guess.
The problem I’m seeing is that several people have suggested Bush should have left the school in order to “take charge” of the situation. And the argument made against that is that nobody really knew what was going on yet and there was no response that could be made that quickly.
Now I’ve made the argument that Bush should have left the building because there was a realistic possibility he was in danger there. And you’re saying that the Secret Service had already analyzed the situation and made an assessment of what was happening and had a response in place to handle the threat.
Do you see where I’m having trouble reconciling these two positions? If what you say is correct, even if all of the other branches of the government were still struggling, Bush could have stepped out of the classroom and been briefed on the situation by his Secret Service detail. And he could have had the same response that was protecting the school from attack set up around the other targets to protect them as well. Or, alternately, if the other people are correct and this wasn’t possible then we can’t assume the Secret Service could guarantee the President’s safety at the school when it couldn’t be certain what attacks might be made.
And I don’t want to seem like I’m joking about a national tragedy. But don’t you find it difficult to argue that we had a plan for “potential threats from the sky” in a thread about 9/11?
The attack may have shocked GWBush less than most Americans. Since June 2001, Richard Clarke had grown increasingly alarmed at reports of Al Qaeda activity, and he wished the administration would act more forcefully. On August 6, 2001 President Bush received a CIA briefing that began with the following 2 sentences: Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America.” The second to last sentence said the following: Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. After receiving this warning, President George W Bush told the CIA analyst, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.” So it’s understandable that the President decided to go on with the photo opportunity.