Well, I’d call about half of that “making up shit about movie I’ve never seen, and steadfastedly refuse to see so that I won’t be later forced to recant my ignorant spewings.”
But, you know: tomato, tomahto.
Go home Liberal, you’re drunk. Again.
Actually, my point was that since everyone knows the “well known” story of MLK as a great leader, it would be OK if a documentary focused solely on his negative aspects. It would be like saying: “You know what you know about MLK, here is some more info to help you form a more complete picture of the man”. Not all documentaries have to present all sides of an issue, especially if they are presenting a new side, and the other sides are well known.
I have not seen the movie, but I will address this issue. You don’t have to waste 5-7 minutes in order not to cause hysteria among the kids. Just take 1 minute to calmly explain that something has arisen and you have to leave, get up and calmly leave the room, and let someone else finish the story for the kids. That would not have caused them any alarm or hysteria.
And frankly, given the magnitude of the problem, it would have been OK to cause a few kids to become hysterical. You never know how many lives you can save with a few extra minutes during a crisis. Saving hundreds of lives vs making a few kids hysterical is an easy choice. (This is besides the point that he actually could have avoided making them hysterical without wasting precious minutes. Also, in this particular case leaving earlier may not have saved any lives, but when the crisis just erupted, he didn’t know that. He should have acted ASAP, as you should during any crisis, especially a national crisis)
Excellent points, Polerius. I hadn’t even stopped to realize how ridiculous the argument about hysterical kids was.
Hindsight is perfect vision, isn’t it. As I recall — and you can verify this by digging up the old MPS thread about the event — it was a lot longer than a few minutes before anyone had even contextualized it as a national crisis. No one was even sure whether it was a small plane, a large plane, or for that matter, a plane at all, other than eyewitnesses and the unfortunate people whom the terrorists murdered. No one knew how much damage there was, including firemen who rushed to the scene and, rather pathetically in hindsight, began to trek their way toward the upper floors. Certainly, no one knew that any building would collapse or that thousands of lives would be lost, except maybe Miss Cleo. The previews to the film show something like nine minutes passing, and of course Moore counts down the time slowly with a cinematic technique called “parallel editing” which in this case cuts back and forth between a clock and key players in Bush’s entourage. It is a technique used since the days of the great director D. W. Griffith to exaggerate the passage of time. I can’t imagine how he might have saved lives by abruptly excusing himself and rushing out of the school. Even flight controllers at the front line of the event weren’t sure what was going on for quite some time. It was more than nine minutes before it dawned on them even that there was a third plane headed toward, at that time, the White House. (It changed its destination later to the Pentagon after overflying the White House twice.) But of course, even with all that aside, presidents don’t — make that can’t — move swiftly in the kind of situation Bush was in. Security is a flexible but gargantuan machine that is charged with making certain of the President’s safety at all times. It is entirely possible that during that nine minutes (or ten or eleven or whatever) that security was making arrangements for the transportation of the President, and that he was advised to wait patiently until they were given the go. As you likely know, in matters of Secret Service security, the decisions are not his. If they believe that his safety is threatened, they may pick him up by the underarms and carry him wherever they think he should be. Their emergency procedures are not something that they discuss with him to get his approval. At any rate, my point is that nothing whatsoever can be discerned from Bush’s reaction. Everything is a wild-ass guess. Moore selected the worst possible interpretation, evidenced by the fact that you believe he endangered lives, and copied cinematic techniques from film pioneers to dramatize it. It is classic shock jock cinema.
You must have seen a different version of the film than I did because this isn’t how the sequence ran in the film I saw.
Oh wait, you haven’t seen and won’t see the film. Which means you’re relying yet again on second-hand faulty information.
Does nothing embarrass you?
I haven’t seen the F911 yet. But this issue of the 9 minutes of nonaction by President Bush intrigues me.
On one hand, I could easily see him standing up and saying something to the effect of, “Excuse me kids, but I have to go. You know, Presidential type stuff.” Then he could have gotten up and left. I know that if I had been in the room I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
On the other hand, what exactly could have been gained by Bush being elsewhere for those 9 minutes? This is not a flippant question. I honestly don’t see what he could have done differently in those 540 seconds that would have saved any lives.
Could he have “saved any lives” by getting up seven minutes earlier? Probably not. I’m not entirely sure that’s the point.
Then what is the point?
That the President of the United States might have more important things to do than entertain a group of schoolkids? That he might want to get his ass to a briefing? That he might want to find out exactly what the hell is going on?
The point, I think, is that instead of sitting he should have been doing something. You know, I think I can understand it though. When something like that happens, I become transfixed. Depending on where I am, I turn to the internet, the TV, the radio, and wait for more news to come to me. If I were the President of the United States, I would not have to wait. I would have the ability to make the news come to me. Say “bye” to the kids, and go get started. Get started scurrying about the country like a scalded cat, as it turned out, but nevertheless even that impressed the country. “What leadership!” we all said. My point, I think, is that he was just like you or I in his reaction. But he didn’t need to be! He was the President of the United States and had both the ability and the capability to react as such. He didn’t.
Why, he could have donned his Spiderman costume and shot up giant webs to catch any more incoming planes, that’s what.
It’s scary how much I find myself agreeing with Lib in this thread, but I have to add my Bush-despising voice to the chorus that says just exactly what was Bush supposed to do in those nine minutes, and on what basis is he open to criticism for not doing that?
It seems to me there’s some hindsight through binoculars with x-ray and infra-vision going on here.
Sure we all know how world changing 9/11 has proved to be. Think, if you can, to what the sitiuation was pre-9/11. And more importantly what it was just after the first plane hit.
A plane hit a building. That’s bad, but heaps of manmade and natural disasters happen. So do bad terrorist attacks. The pres is not expected to jump up and down about each of them, breaking off his current engagement and tearing off to do goodness knows what every time.
It was if I recall rightly, ages before the pattern of attacks and so on and the implications of that were realised. Many more than nine minutes.
Moore is a left wing shock jock, is all.
Stop drinking so much. 
The simple notion that, in a time of crisis, a leader should lead.
Sure.
First plane hits: people are stunned, wonder what’s going on, was this a pilot error or what?
Second plane hits, right next to the first: HOLY FARKING SCHNIDT! This was no accident!
…and George W. Bush is still sitting in that classroom for seven minutes, even after he was told by his Chief of Staff, “America is under attack.”
For you, maybe. For me, and everyone I’ve talked to, when that second plane hit, we knew this was not an accident, not a coincidence, but deliberate, malicious action.
The terroists forgot to tell him about the morning meeting before killing a bunch of innocent civilians.
And to you, rjung, please answer me this. What is the time window for a President to respond to an unprecedented disaster or act of war? I won’t pretend to have your psyche naild spot-on, but I would suspect had Bush stood up after 15 seconds and started screaming into a phone what to do, you hit him for not taking time to form a proper response.
Your ignorance does just a bit. As I said, I did see the portion I wrote about. It was a preview clip that Moore brought to his Jon Stewart interview. Moore said that it went on for, I believe, nine minutes. I suppose that your experience illustrates that seeing the film is not necessarily an advantage. One must understand what one sees.
Presidential historian Fred Greenstein defended Bush’s decision to project calm rather than excitement, and told the 9/11 commission, “It’s made a little more complex by being in the presence of little kids. It certainly wouldn’t present the right message if he turned white, rushed out, and kids started crying.” No other president has had the misfortune to have cameras in his face at a time like this. Otherwise, we would have seen Franklin Roosevelt with his head buried in his hands, lamenting the future of his presidency when he got news of Pearl Harbor. We would have seen Kennedy sleeping through 12 hours of the Cuban missle crisis. And we would have seen Lyndon Johnson’s deer-caught-in-the-headlights reaction to his sudden acension to the presidency rather than the staged swearing in on Air Force One much later. Even then, the image-makers overlooked Jackies blood-stained dress. Like Princhester, I am loathe to defend George W Bush, but those who complain of Bush’s leadership during 9/11 do not understand what leadership is.
I mentioned myself that in this particular case he probably wouldn’t have been able to save lives had he gotten up earlier. But so what? He didn’t know that at the time. I think it is you who is using hindsight to argue that there was nothing he could do. At the time of the attack he had no way of knowing whether reacting fast to a crisis would save lives or not.
As a rule of thumb: if a crisis occurs, react as quickly as possisble.
This is how you maximize your effectiveness in helping the country. You may not be able to help in every crisis, but you won’t know which crisis will benefit from your quick reaction until its too late.
I think this is painfully obvious.
No one said he was expected to “jump up and down”, he should have calmly gotten up and excused himself. Also, when you say “about each of them”, I don’t think “America is under attack” counts the same as “any old terrorist attack”, so the reaction should be correspondingly stronger and quicker.
Also, you mention “breaking off his current engagement”. When he is indeed in a very serious “current engagement”, yes, he should thnk seriously before breaking it. However, his “current engagement” at the time was reading to some kids, which is not a serious engagement, and “America [was] under attack”, which seems like a pretty strong reason to break just about any engagement, not only reading to kids.
I was in California sleeping when the second plane hit, and I immediately got a phone call from a relative in Europe saying “wake up, America is under attack”. If my relative can figure that out pretty quickly from half way across the world just by watching T V, I think we expect the government to figure it out even quicker. If they did, then Bush was too slow to react. If they didn’t they are a bunch of incompetent fools.
In any case, since someone told Bush “America is under attack”, it seems that they did figure it out very quickly.
Maybe he is and God bless him for that. As I mentioned in another thread, the Left needs its “bad cops” to counter balance the “bad cops” (lie Rush) who are part of the Right’s hugely successful “good-cop bad-cop” strategy.
In any case, even if Moore is a lying sack of shit, doesn’t mean that *everything * he says is false. We are debating a point about Bush’s reaction after the attaks, and it does not matter what Moore thinks of the matter. Simple logic tells us that Bush should have reacted faster.
It is almost amusing to see these naive interpretations of how the American republic works. George Bush is not the nation’s Prime Minister. Unlike a parliamentary democracy, America’s Chief Executive is both the head of state and the head of government. I for one do not want my President reacting to world events on the assessment of a White House staffer or a cousin from Europe.
Incidentally, Polerius, here is the perspective of someone who was there, someone who did not vote for Bush: http://www.naplesnews.com/npdn/florida/article/0,2071,NPDN_14910_2985640,00.html