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.
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.
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?
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.
The book was actually called “The Pet Goat,” by the way. I know this changes everything.
But that’s irrelevant to this question - the “they” who could have instructed the crews sooner wouldn’t have included Bush.
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.
Some presidents might do less damage reading books to children than trying to run the country.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I find the persistent error in calling it My Pet Goat to be the most annoying aspect of the incident.
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)
Well, that’s extraordinarily poor reasoning. I’m a bit shocked.
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.
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.
Based on this page - Timeline for the day of the September 11 attacks - Wikipedia
the 9:05 entry does state that the word “attack” was used.