Which, if it were something that they could possibly have done, I imagine they’d have been a bit more proactive about it than “Let’s wait and hope he leaves the classroom in time.”
But that’s the whole point. That situation may have come up. You’re using hindsight again, saying the situation didn’t really come up, so it couldn’t have.
Fighters were scrambled. If one of the hijacked planes had been up in the air later for whatever reason, the situation may have called for shooting it down. Would you want the president to be informed with all of the up to the minute information, or would you rather say “OK, Mr. President, I know you’ve been sitting there listening to My Pet Goat, but you have to make a decision in the next minute, so let me get you up to date with all the information we have in the next 30 seconds…”
I don’t know what you’re talking about “I imagine they’d have been a bit more proactive about it”… that’s the entire point of this discussion. The president didn’t know what was happening, or what decisions he’d have to make, which is EXACTLY WHY HE SHOULD’VE BEEN MORE PROACTIVE ABOUT IT.
We’re no longer discussing the actual event, then. We’re discussing a completely different scenario in which Bush is told something completely different than what he was told.
I really have no idea how you guys are struggling with such simple concepts. “In hindsight, he couldn’t have done anything” is not at all a valid way to evaluate his decisions at the time. The key point is that at the time, he did not know what sort of decisions he might’ve had to make, and he should’ve been prepared for them to the best of his ability. Whether or not to shoot down an airliner is exactly the sort of decision he may have been faced with, and yet he chose to remain deliberately unprepared and uninformed for the first critical minutes of the crisis.
Exactly. Driving down the road with your eyes closed is a stupid thing to do, even if it turns out you get lucky and don’t hit anyone.
The pretzels people are twisting themselves into to defend his actions are stunning.
All the President had to do was politely excuse himself and walk across the hall to get briefed by his team. That would have been the sensible and responsible course of action. Instead he choked.
I’m not sure why it’s so hard for people just to admit that Bush choked. In the grand scheme of 9/11, Bush choking for a few minutes is not very important. In fact, the only reason that it’s worth talking about is that so many people are so invested in pretending he didn’t choke.
Word to that whole post, Hamster Dan. Very well said. What do you make of the Andrew Card interview and his decision to avoid a dialogue? (Yes, I am obsessed with that, but it is bizarre, and revealing I think…of something.)
Right, and not only that, but even if he needed to stay in the building he should have been out in the hall conferring with aides. It’s not even relevant whether there is something he could have done within that seven minutes. Seven more minutes of getting up to speed would make him more quickly be able to make a decision a half hour or an hour later. That is, if he was actually the kind of president who gathered information and made decisions. I think that is what is really in doubt here–and why partisans are furiously defending him, because they do not want to acknowledge that their emperor had no clothes. Same reason people came up with cockamamie defences for Sarah Palin.
No, his staff should do that. Which they can do, and were doing, without Bush telling them to. And which they can do just as fast, and get the results to the President just as fast, when the President is in a classroom as when he is in the Presidential limosine being driven to the airport.
No, it is not the President’s job to make snap decisions. It is the President’s job to make decisions based on the best information available. Which his staff collects without being asked, and without having Bush on the phone asking “areyoudoneyetareyoudoneyet” for seven minutes at a crack.
The chances of that happening approach 100%.
Regards,
Shodan
Right, 'cause they had all the data to give him and…oh…wait. They didn’t. They didn’t actually know much more than they already told him at that time. But, I’m sure, in that 7 minutes they could have put together all of the relevant data and facts he’d need to…get in a car and drive to the air port and get on Air Force One. After the Secret Service finally figured out where he could go of course.
You are actually asserting that a bunch of Democrats would be wasting time now pointing out that Bush left a classroom immediately after being told that the nation was under attack. And that we would be arguing that he should have stayed for a few more minutes listening to the children’s story. I’m sorry, but that statement is stunningly idiotic. <SNL voice> Really?!? Really. </SNL voice>
It’s funny: I should be getting more angry at conservatives for blocking food stamps and other such substantive things; but it really sticks in my craw that this assertion is being made about liberals. You just punking us, trying to get our goats? Where are the hidden cameras?
ETA:
Have you seen that movie flight 93?
Part of it is devoted to the guy who was on his first day overseeing the flight control network (played by the real guy). Another portion of it was in the military HQ overseeing military flying. Would it not have been helpful for the president to be patched through to one of those two commanders? Was no one on his team already in communication with them? If not, sounds like he put an incompetent group around him. And do you think it would have been fine for either of those guys to take a seven minute break from their jobs?
He sees the world through this ridiculous hyper-partisan lens, and it’s telling that he actually thinks it’s not only possible, but likely that someone would actually criticize Bush, 15 years later, for calmly excusing himself from a press stunt during a national crisis.
It’s actually a microcosm of a lot of the attitudes in this thread. If he can convince himself that everyone is as hyper-partisan as he is, that they’d take any chance to attack his side, even for something as absurd as pretending people would criticize the aforementioned decision, then he can dismiss any criticism against him or his side. After all, the people attacking him are so insanely partisan that they’d attack anything he or his side said, therefore all their criticism can be dismissed.
That’s easily proven false by the fact that there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of random things that Bush did over the course of his presidency that in fact HAVE been completely forgotten.
Heck, I have vague memories that on 9/11 itself there was a minor issue of “where is the president, why isn’t he on TV right now being presidential and making a speech or whatever”, and it turned out that he was being hustled around between airbases or something because it was (sensibly) determined that keeping his location secret and safe was way more important than giving a speech or being visible. Now, that’s exactly the kind of thing that your fantasy world ultra-partisan usual suspect liberal might latch onto and complain about. And yet no one does. Why? Because Bush’s actions, while superficially “cowardly” in some very trivial senses, was clearly, with a moment’s thought, sensible and necessary and also probably mostly out of his control. Thus, we don’t bitch about it.
Sitting in a room for seven minutes reading to kids instead of being ready to actually be a leader, on the other hand, wasn’t.
In other words, what Slackerinc said.
After all the back and forth in this thread, I think I can narrow this down to two key questions:
(1) Clearly at SOME point over the course of 9/11, a situation is going to come up in which the president could or should make a decision. At that point, the decision might be extraordinarily time-critical. Would you then rather your president had 7 extra minutes or discussion, review and thought, even if it was merely background material, review of protocols and deployments, etc?
(2) Had the president in fact gotten up immediately, excused himself to the kids and parents, and left the room, and if you were for some reason analyzing this decision with 12 years of hindsight, would it ever possibly occur to you that the president should NOT have done that?
Yes, those are two essential questions. Somehow I am predicting more crickets.
[QUOTE=SlackerInc]
Have you seen that movie flight 93?
Part of it is devoted to the guy who was on his first day overseeing the flight control network (played by the real guy). Another portion of it was in the military HQ overseeing military flying. Would it not have been helpful for the president to be patched through to one of those two commanders? Was no one on his team already in communication with them? If not, sounds like he put an incompetent group around him. And do you think it would have been fine for either of those guys to take a seven minute break from their jobs?
[/QUOTE]
No, I haven’t seen the movie but, you know, it’s a movie. Would it be helpful for the President of the US to be patched into the direct conversations of people dealing with the issues and problem? Hell no it wouldn’t be helpful even if Bush wasn’t a total boob. In real life the President isn’t directly patched into the operations side. That’s not his job.
But, even if it were, it’s just not feasible. We know in retrospect exactly who had the critical information that the President needed, but at the time it was all extremely unclear. There was no way for the folks around the President to know what was important and what was chaff…or what was correct or incorrect. The situation was completely muddled, and even after they got him on Air Force One it remained so for hours…hell, no one know everything that was going on and had a complete picture for probably weeks after it all shook out. That’s the part that I think a lot of you fail to understand. You think that because now, years later we have a fairly good idea of what was going on, that this was the case then. The reality is that you had multiple people who had a little piece of the overall puzzle, but that little fragments of what was going on would be almost meaningless to the President who needed the big picture. He’s not an operational guy, regardless of who actually IS President. He’s the ultimate big picture guy, and it took a long time before the big picture started to really emerge from the chaos of that day.
Yes, a meticulously researched movie in which Ben Sliney, FAA operations manager that day, played himself (as did some of the military personnel).
No, more denial.
I too would never (before) have imagined the silliness I’m seeing in this thread. I’m not even going to bother with the hypocrisy accusation “Had a Democrat spent minutes finishing a task underway when a major crisis came to light, the amount of screaming from the other side of the aisle would be ear shattering”. This just isn’t about comparative stupidity of partisans.
I am though going to repeat the assertion that the 7 minutes could have been otherwise employed. And given only the situation known to the President and those of his team present at the school at that moment, the use of those minutes for a briefing on every detail and nuance available would have been the smart bet, the best bet, and the wisest course of action.
Bush – and all of us – are merely fortunate that as it turned out, the President was not in fact called upon to make an instant decision of critical importance to our country at 9 that morning – or at any time for quite a while afterward. Doing nothing Presidential turned out to be the best thing Bush could do. But HE DIDN’T KNOW THAT AT THAT MOMENT and NEITHER DID ANYBODY ON HIS TEAM.
What if at 9:01 another airplane had been discovered, this one coming in from the Atlantic ocean and broadcasting a radio message claiming to be carrying a nuclear device. At that moment we didn’t know there were only four. Hell, we didn’t know there WERE four. Would the defenders still be claiming that sitting in a classroom listening to a first grader read a story was the appropriate action for our President to take?
SlackerInc, I can think of some really nasty possibilities for Card avoiding Bush questions. Maybe he didn’t want to alarm Bush by being unable to offer reassurance that everything was going to be alright. Maybe he was afraid that, without clear direction from Cheney or other handlers, Bush would do something really stupid and irremediable. But I don’t want to offer those as actual assertions, as I don’t really believe them myself. But otherwise, I just don’t have a suggestion.
if someone drops the ball, it’s scored as an error only if the other team gets a base out of it.
I think it was just an effort to protect the President from accidentally saying something out loud on camera. He was telling Bush something that was both surprising and hugely important, and there was a non-zero chance that the President might inadvertently respond loudly enough to be picked up on mike. By delivering his message quickly and stepping back he remove that possibility.
Holding the fate of the United States of America in one’s hand isn’t scored like a baseball game.
That’s nice, and I’m interested in seeing it now, but it’s still just a movie designed to entertain. I seriously doubt it could convey all of the confusion and frustration going on that day as multiple different people struggled to get a handle on what was going on. The folks who probably knew the most about their little piece of the action were the ones at the lower levels…flight controllers and such. THEIR bosses might have had a little bit of the puzzle, and their bosses a little less, and their bosses a little less…and then we start getting to the level of the folks that would actually be giving key information to the President.
Even if this movie was 100% accurate I fail to see how that indicates that Bush should have been in the direct loop of what was going on. Again, you’d need to know, right then, that the folks he was talking to directly who were actually dealing with events as they were transpiring were the right people for him to actually be talking too. And then you’d have to think that a President micromanaging or even following along with his focus on one little piece instead of the big picture is a good idea. I can tell you from my own experience that even having my own boss following along closely with events during an emergency isn’t a good idea…let alone her boss, or her bosses boss.
The folks who knew the most of what was going on, who had the fragments they were involved in were already dealing with the issues the best they could. Their bosses were already trying to gather the information as best they could. And their bosses bosses were already trying to piece together information and reports to get to folks like the Presidents advisers the best they could. None of this was going to happen in the 7 or so minutes the President took to simply stay put, act calm and listen to a bunch of school kids read while his people trying to put together a coherent report that would actually be meaningful to him. I’d guess that it was hours later that he ACTUALLY got a report that had much meaningful in it.