The “hegemonistic and imperialist tyrant who is determined to seize wealth and power for himself at the expense of our freedom” explains himself on Larry King Live:
I don’t see anything there about gathering information, warming up Air force one, or not freaking out children. Mr. Sensitive-in-chief was collecting his thoughts.
As for the children, you simply left that out. I have the interview on DVR, and he says that he was just waiting for that portion of the lesson to be over, apparently knowing that it was coming to a conclusion. I don’t think anyone has said that he was gathering information. His staff was gathering information. He’s not the Detective in Chief. Also, no one has said that he was warming up Marine One. They have someone who does that for him.
But let’s take your snippet as the sole information. The question, as I see it, is whether there is a single appropriate Thing To Do ®. If there is one and only one Thing To Do ®, then if Bush didn’t do that, he fucked up. But if, as is almost always the case, there is some reasonable range of appropriate Things To Do ®, then the question is whether collecting one’s thoughts is one of them.
Now, I’ve heard the argument that what Carr whispered was that “America is under attack” and that therefore, Bush should have responded as though it were Pearl Harbor. (Nevermind that some reports say that Roosevelt just sat there with his head buried in his hands upon hearing that news.) But the fact is that Bush already knew the relative scope of things — one, and now two, hijacked planes. He knew that the FAA and NORAD were on top of it. (Yes, I know they made some errors, but so would you, and so do all human beings, and the 9/11 CR praises what they did.)
So, sitting there, he understands that “America is under attack” does not mean that there are waves of MIGs from some foreign state carpet bombing New York and Washington. In a situation where very little is known, information is being gathered, and reports are changing by the minute, is collecting one’s thoughts one of the many reasonable ways to respond? I say that it is, and I would hope that any leader would choose a response that was equally reasonable. Were he to have acted hastily, his critics on this matter would be arguing that he should have taken just a few minutes to think things through. How do I know this? Because they already criticize him for not thinking — some even for a perceived inability to think. But they are like the sore losers criticizing the winner for how he makes his bank deposit. If they’re so smart, why aren’t they president?
Bush acted reasonably in this instance. It may not be exactly what any of us would do as leaders, but unless there is one and only one Thing To Do ®, all this criticism smacks of desperation and sour grapes.
You do realize that other people gather information for the President, right? Ditto on the warming up AF1. Though he did fly F-102s, I don’t think he personally flips the switches on his Boeing.
‘Sound and fury, signifying nothing’ aptly describes people whining about his lack of cape-donning and pulling a Superman in those 7 minutes.
Sorry, dude. Not a single one of those says your “remarks about Gore were completely consistent with my five-year position at the board”, which is what you claimed. Agreeing with you and/or commenting that they believe you to be serious is not equivalent to saying that you have been consistent for 5 years.
You lose.
So you admit that George W. Bush is as useless as the fifth wheel on a tricycle, then. Geez, pop, what do we even need a President for?
I do indeed lose — I lose the opportunity to engage in honest discussion with someone making sincere inquiry, e.g., someone who will admit to knowing what those people meant by “core principles”. I have reached the point where I no longer care to convince you of anything, any more than I wish to convince an ashtray of anything. Whether I am a winner or a loser in your eyes no longer matters to me.
Uh, that same poster said you “appear on the surface to be a loon”. Appearing to be a loon does not jibe with being ‘completely consistent’ over 5 years. Besides which, siding with Al Gore ONCE in 5 years doesn’t get you the crown of “Most Neutral Doper Ever”. I recall agreeing with Bush once, yet I am not claiming to be a bastion of impartiality.
I don’t even mind your constant opaque arguments, obfuscation, and use of self-invented jargon; I know that’s just your style. But when you hold yourself out as a politically “disinterested observer”, that’s just more than I can bear.
I bow to few people in the frequently-getting-irritated-with-Liberal contest. I find him to be a smug and condescending intellectual bully who has mastered the art of obfuscation.
That said, one thing he is not is intellectually dishonest.
He may not have had a 5-year pattern of supporting Gore, but he has, as long as I’ve been paying attention, lauded and supported anyone who supported increased civil liberties.
By the way, I don’t think his “neutrality” is particularly special or praiseworthy. The vast majority of dopers are basically intellectually honest and make their decisions about issues on a case-by-case basis. The fact that he may (or may not) agree with one of the major political parties less often than most dopers is neither good nor bad, it just is.
Oh, and Pervert: I owe you a response to your last long post responding to me, I’ll get around to it at some point today hopefully.
To keep you frothing mad, son.
Gosh, pop, you really are a senile old coot, ain’cha?
It wouldn’t have been prudent for the president to make the Extraordinarily Controversial And Fraught With Peril decision to politely leave an elementary school classroom without consulting his people first? Seriously? I gotta say I can’t even begin to see any way in which this particular claim approaches rationality… am I misunderstanding what you meant?
Here’s a case where we need more quoting-of-quoting. I’m responding to your claim that it takes several minutes to change priorities. It doesn’t have to. It would hardly have been insanely rash for Bush to get up, say “sorry, kids, gotta go”, walk out of the classroom, and immediately turn to his staff and say “unless someone has strong intelligence that we should stay put, let’s get out of here”.
While I agree that he had communication equipment in the school, there were obviously other places where there was more communication equipment. And, for the record, Card could easily have been watching CNN. In fact, that’s probably how he got the news.
It’s certainly evidence of at vapidity or indecisiveness, although it’s hardly proof by itself.
Ahh, the Ronald Reagan fallacy. Back during Iran Contra, he was asked whether he remembered having approved some particular deal or other, and he said “everyone who remembers what they were doing on Sep. 14, 1995, raise your hand”. But that’s not the question at all. The question is “everyone who remembers approving treason, raise your hand”.
In this case, the question is not whether Bush (or anyone) should be able to remember every single piece of information he’d been presented with in the previous 6 months. The question is whether Bush and/or his advisers, particularly given their spin that they took the terrorist threat very seriously pre-9/11, should remember rather specific warnings that Al Qaeda might try to attack the US.
Although we’re getting off topic here, as the primary discussion is not about whether Bush should have turned around before even getting to the school (although that’s a fine discussion… perhaps someone should start it).
I hate to sound vague and wishy washy, but the point is not that that’s a particularly damning issue in itself, it’s whether it’s a pattern of Bush being an indecisive and weak leader.
This seems to be the crux of the issue. My belief is that given the knowledge available to Bush at the time, it was entirely plausible, even likely, that there were meaningful decisions he could make starting that very moment which might be extremely time-critical. Given the Hentor theory, there might well have been such actions, and they were not taken. It’s of course possible, maybe even likely, that Bush might have leapt up with the greatest intentions, gone out into the other room, and had an incredibly intense brain-storming session with advisers discussing possible courses of action, and still not come up with anything useful. But the fact that he didn’t even try is what’s so damning.
Seven minutes may not seem like much time in an absolute sense… but hijackings and terrorist acts in general are situations in which seconds can make all the difference, and that’s as true for the president as it is for, say, air traffic controllers.
Not massive retardation, no, all exaggeration aside. I don’t think Bush is actually capital-S-Stupid. Rather, I think that he’s a terrible leader, and he assumes other people will make the decisions. He’s a figurehead. Now, if the other people making those decisions are the smartest and most decisive people ever, that’s fine.
But the thing that really gets my goat here is that lots of people are voting for Bush BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE HE’S A STRONG LEADER. Which I think could hardly be farther from the truth.
If the vast majority of people, when polled about Bush, said “well, he’s a dumbass who just does what Rumsfeld and Ashcroft and Cheney tell him. But man, I love me some Rumsfeld and Ashcroft and Cheney. So I’ll vote for him despite knowing that he’s a doltish figurehead” I wouldn’t be making anywhere near such a big deal out of this issue.
My God.
There is no argument so hackneyed, overused, and already-dismissed-as-nonsense that Brutus won’t use it.
I mean, dear lord, man, did you even read this thread?
Just to make a feeble attempt to be constructive, not that that’s ever worked before when arguing with you, I’ll quote the appropriate part of my most recent post, and I challenge you, in the sight of God and Cecil, to respond to it without resorting to hyperbole:
Hmmm… let’s think for a moment. First there was one hijacked plane. Now there are two. By golly! I’m beginning to detect a pattern! There could be MORE hijacked planes! Perhaps as many as 4! I wonder whether I, as president, might take some action that would warn the other planes in the air, or launch fighters, or anything of that sort. No, wait, I’d better assume that my advisers have the situation under control. After all, I wouldn’t want to risk breaking their chain of thought. Wouldn’t be prudent. And if I took an Insane Rash Crazy Ramboesque action like actually launching fighters just because of some minor issue like hijacked planes crashing into towers, why then the liberal press will have a field day criticizing my overzealousness. And I can’t have that.
Sure. But…
(a) seven minutes is a LOT of time to collect one’s thoughts in the middle of a continually-developing national crisis of unprecedented scope
(b) call me a partisan Bush-basher, but it’s convenient that it’s very hard, from external evidence alone, to distinguish between “collecting one’s thoughts” and “sitting there like a dolt waiting to be dolt what to do and say”.
I can barely BEGIN to point out all the things that are wrong with this paragraph.
(1) First of all, I’ve criticized you before for using the “people would still complain if he’d done X” argument. It’s insulting. It’s condescending. It’s just wrong. But most importantly, its totally irrelevant. I claim that a Good Thing for him to do would be to get up and leave the classroom. I may be right. I may be wrong. But if I’m right, then it shouldn’t matter whether that would have been unpopular-in-retrospect. I don’t care if the fucking ghost of George Washington came back from the dead and said “George W. Buuuuuuuush… you should not have leeeeft… the classssroooooom”. He should do what is right.
(2) “If they’re so smart, why aren’t they president”? “They are like the sore losers”? Huh? Oh, that’s a productive argument. Any time anyone who is not in power criticizes anyone who is in power, about anything, ever, they’re a sore loser, and if they’re so smart, why aren’t they in power? Yeah, that’s going to raise the level of discourse on the SDMB. Sheesh.
Fiddlesticks. The fact that there is no One Perfect Course Of Action doesn’t mean that all criticism is meaningless, which is what you seem to be implying.
You criticize what hordes of public figures do in a huge variety of situations, often with justification. In how many of those situations are you criticizing them for not doing the One Thing To Do?
To repeat my cite from GD, Bill Maher nails it:
And to repeat my refutation, sigh, no he didn’t.
If you think that gathering information is more important than gathering thoughts, you have to propose what he could have done to gather information more quickly.
He misses the point also on the “Presenting calm until he had more information”. Once again, you have to propose an activity which the president had to do which would have allowed him to get such information.
The facts are that he talked to his people before, recieved an update during, and talked to them imediately after the time spend in the school room. To characterize this as choking is just plain silly.
Oh, and BTW, I notice he repeats the inuendo that Bush could have done something to alleviate the attacks if only … … something.
I wonder when the president first encountered this mental conundrum?
If three years hasn’t provided him with the needed imagination, what must the first seven minutes have been like inside that head of his?
BJM: *So what is a president supposed to be? PR-Guy-in-Chief? Now I’m not surprised Bush responded this way, since being a front man seems to be the only thing he has ever been good at; and these days political governance seems to be about eighty percent spin. (Sounds like we have the makings of a good GD thread here.)
If you’re content with a president who is in the business mostly for the curtain calls, so be it.*
The “curtain calls” issue is exactly it, I think. I have never really cared much about the seven-minutes issue one way or another; I agree with those who think that there’s probably no alternative scenario that would have made much substantive difference to the ongoing events.
However, there’s no question that what Bush did projected a superficial appearance of impotence and uncertainty. While I don’t think it’s fair to read too much into that, I have to say that his administration pretty much brought it on themselves by continuing with a purely public-relations Presidential public appearance, WITH a camera running, when they KNEW the nation was under attack.
This administration has been even more spin-obsessed than politicians in general, IMHO. They go to a hell of a lot of effort and taxpayer expense—witness the whole flight-suited “Mission Accomplished” performance—to make Bush look appealing. So they left him sitting in a photo-op with schoolkids while disaster was striking, and as a result he came across as a doofus whose input isn’t considered important enough even to his own handlers for them to pull him off of “My Pet Goat” classroom duty at the start of a national crisis.
I tend to agree that this image is not really fair to Bush’s intelligence or his level of involvement. But I can’t muster up much sympathy for those who complain about unfairly tarnishing his image, seeing that he was only image-polishing anyway. Live by the spin, die by the spin; he was after a photo-op, well, he got a photo-op.
First off, just call me Brutus. And for the last time, what the hell could GWB possibly have done? Concrete actions, now. Don’t give me vague hand-wavings and generalities. You have seven minutes. Limit yourself to the information at hand at that moment.(Don’t forget, your ceaseless whining is all with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.) How would those concrete actions which you will describe have changed the situation on 9/11?
That’s right son. Mediocre you is the best that my tired and damaged seed could produce.
You’re asking the wrong question. The question is not whether I can right now think of something which could concretely have been done right then, given the information they had at hand.
The question is whether Bush, given the information he had at hand, could have come to the conclusion that there WAS no possible action.
Anyhow, as Hentor the Barbarian has persuasively argued, he could have called up the FAA and asked them if they’d alerted all other airborne passenger jets about the possibility of a hijacking (they hadn’t).
Would it have made a difference? Who knows. But that’s not the point. It MIGHT have made a difference. It COULD have made a difference. And by sitting there like a lump, Bush killed that possibility.
And if we go back in time to the first reported hijacking, or when the first plane hit the first tower, there are a LOT of things that could, and should, have been done.