Sometimes I wonder what Jeralynn is thinking:
The scenes of Bush continuing to read to children in a classroom after being told by aides of the WTC attacks were some of the most compelling in Fahrenheit 9/11. What was Bush thinking? Did he not understand? Did he think it would all go away? Was he really at such a loss as to what to do that he decided to sit there until someone gave him instructions?
Why do people praise his handling of the terror war post-9/11? Bush chose to go after a target that was not an immediate threat to the U.S., at the cost of failing to stop Al Qaeda, which his administration now tells us is about to launch an even bigger attack against us. What has he accomplished? His Attorney General put some young wannabes from Buffalo and Oregon in jail, but dropped the ball on the real terrorists. Osama’s at large (unless he’s in hiding for a timed perp walk before the election.) The security restrictions we now live with on a constant basis resemble those of a foreign dictatorship, not a free democracy.
What should he have done? What could he have done? Do you honestly believe hecould have stopped one ounce of blood from being spilled? Saved one life? Do you think if he had freaked out and run out of the classroom, we would now have Osama bin Laden in custody? Do you know for sue what information Bush was given, and why he chose to finish the story rather than run out?
If John Kerry had been President, and he left the room when you say he should have, would there be fewer casualties at the World Trade Center? At the Pentagon? at The crash in PA? Would we now have Osama in custody?
I am so sick and tired of this slur from Michael Moore and I hate how the Democrats think this is a reasonable criticism of the President.
And this line is just absurd: “Bush chose to go after a target that was not an immediate threat to the U.S.”
Three questions:
What was the date of the WTC and Pentagon attacks?
On what date did operations in Afghanistan begin?
On what date did operations in Iraq begin?
Next canard, please.
Dodd
“Bush made the right decision in remaining calm, in not rushing out of the classroom,” said Lee Hamilton, vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission and a former Democratic congressman from Indiana.
Q.E.D. (Of course, Hamilton’s one of the few Dems who hasn’t consistently seen the 9/11 Commission as a tool for partisan sniping, so it’s small wonder he takes a different view.)
Jane Finch
I agree with you…this is a pointless slur, and anyone can play the “coulda, shoulda, woulda” game to no logical end.
Rick
Can anyone say definitively (and prefereably with a good URL) whether this famous 7 minutes–which is by no means an eternity– occurred after the President was told of the second WTC plane, or the first.
All blogospheric references to it I’ve seen rather manage to blur that minor point.
Cordially…
Dr. Weevil
Jeralynn doesn’t even mention that if Osama is “at large”, he’s done nothing since December 2001 to prove it. The tapes released since then have been ludicrous fakes — I mean their dates have been faked, even when the images are genuine pre-12/01 stuff.
Either Osama’s dead or he’s so frightened he won’t allow a 2-minute video to be taken to prove he’s alive. Today’s cameras are cheap and not very heavy, and the people who killed Daniel Pearl made (so I’m told) a whole music video out of the murder. It would be ridiculously easy to make a film of Osama in which he mentions some specific recent event. Since he doesn’t do that, he is either dead, captured (yeah, right), or extremely constrained in what he’s willing and able to do. Jeralyn and others write as if he were walking around free thumbing his nose at the world like Castro or Robert Mugabe instead of lurking in a cave somewhere or (more likely) moving from safehouse to taxi to spiderhole every couple of hours, like Saddam last fall.
Then again, maybe Osama’s alive but horribly mutilated by a near-miss bomb or missile and doesn’t want any of his followers to know. Call me cruel, but I rather like the idea.
Jay
John take a look the post on my site about this and look at what the loons are saying.
It’s a pathology.
shark
If only Kerry had acted so dceisively when he was told about holes in Logan airport security….I guess he couldn’t be bothered to ever visit ground zero. After all, it was only the “little people” who died…
M. Scott Eiland
This issue is pretty much a moonbat litmus test for me–if I see a lefty seriously arguing it, as opposed to perfunctorily mentioning it to score cheap political points, I know there’s tinfoil hiding under their hat.
Anon
Can anyone say definitively (and prefereably with a good URL) whether this famous 7 minutes–which is by no means an eternity– occurred after the President was told of the second WTC plane, or the first.
It was after the second. The first plane hit before he entered the classroom but at that point it was unclear whether it was an accident or a terrorist attack. When the second plane hit (and it became clear what was going on), Andy Card entered the classroom and told Bush that America was under attack.
At this point, the President of the United States decided not to get up and tell the children that the nation needed him (it turns out that, pace John Cole, there are other options besides sitting on one’s ass and running out of the room screaming), but instead he elected to sit there for another seven minutes.
In hindsight, this probably makes no difference. It is doubtful that anything he could have done would have saved any lives. But decisions are not made in hindsight. At that moment, Bush did not know what was going on. He did not know (as we do now) the details of the attack that was, by that point, over. All he knew was that America was under some kind of coordinated attack.
Personally, I feel that when the nation is under attack, the President of the United States, the Command in Chief of the US Armed Forces, the most powerful man in the world, should make an attempt to find out what is going on and how he can be most useful. John Cole apparently believes that the President should, I don’t know, take a nap, or make himself a sandwich, or sit staring off into space until his aides come in and whisk him away.
But I guess we’re just two different people.
John Cole
Thanks for telling me whatI think, but whatI actually think he should have done was sit there ‘perilized with terror’ for another 33 minutes. That way he wouldn’t have anything to use as election fodder against Kerry:
The autor notes whatis interesting about Kerry’s remark: “It should be noted that the second plane hit the World Trade Center at 9:03 a.m., and the plane hit the Pentagon at 9:43 a.m. By Kerry’s own words, he and his fellow senators sat there for forty minutes, realizing “nobody could think.”
Go back to Eschaton, Anon.
kelly
Anon, please.
You have no earthly idea what was said to Bush re: the attacks. The was a LOT of confusion. For another thing his Secret Service detail had plenty of say aboout the prez’s next move.
I frankly don’t give a shit about the 7 minutes and why should you?
Oh, I get it. You don’t like Bush so you smugly criticize stupid minutiae like this to prove…what?
Dean
Here’s a scary thought:
So, the President is in a room w/ a bunch of children/retirees/farmers/union members, when word comes that a US city just went up in a gout of mushroom cloud.
AND there may have been a flare over China or Russia, possibly indicating a launch, but the lines to NORAD are out.
Are you REALLY sure you WANT the President, in this day-and-age, to promptly act, rather than, oh, wait a few minutes and see what can be found out?
The truly scary part being, the above scenario is no longer that far-fetched.
Anon
You have no earthly idea what was said to Bush re: the attacks.
Um, well, I guess if you want to call Bush and Card liars then go for it. But I’m just going on what they’ve said here.
I frankly don’t give a shit about the 7 minutes and why should you?
Oh, I get it. You don’t like Bush so you smugly criticize stupid minutiae like this to prove…what?
You see, there’s this stuff called “evidence”. It’s what you use to make judgement about things. A Bush who gets up and does his job is a better Bush than one who sits there “thinking about what it [means] for America to be under attack.”
My dislike of Bush is based on evidence, not the other way around.
jacitelli
No, Anon
Your dislike for Bush is pure partisan politics. At least have enough intellectual honesty to admit that.
Anon
Thanks for telling me what I think,
Well, I just assumed that you had told me what you thought. Since you’re defending Bush’s inaction, I thought that one could assume that you thought it was better for him to sit there than to get up and take whatever action the situation demanded.
The autor notes whatis interesting about Kerry’s remark
Huh? He says that he went to a meeting sometime between the first plane hitting and the second plane hitting and that after the second plane hit, they realized that no one could think (in the present tense, i.e. at that point in time). And then he says that they immediately left the building. Nowhere does he say what My2Cents claims.
Anon
Your dislike for Bush is pure partisan politics. At least have enough intellectual honesty to admit that.
And thank you for telling me what I think, jacitelli. Your psychic powers are truly amazing. Are you available for birthday parties?
If it’s truly impossible for you to imagine that there are rational reasons to dislike Bush then I’m afraid it’s you who has a problem with partisanship, not me.
Anon
Go back to Eschaton, Anon.
Oh, and I don’t read Eschaton.
And I thought Fahrenheit 9/11 was a dishonest piece of crap.
jjacitelli
Oh please,
The very fact that you are criticizing the Pres. over this latest talking point proves that you are very partisan. I don’t need a crystal ball to see that.
By the way, there are plenty of issues to take Bush to task over, but 7 min’s on 9/11 ain’t one of them.
Oregonian
It’s posts like this that make me wonder if “Balloon Juice” is actually a clever parody of the lunatic right-wing fringe.
I mean, just how seriously are we supposed to take this? Does “John Cole” really believe that the role of the President is to read “My Pet Goat” in front of a group of schoolchildren when the nation is under attack? Is “John Cole” the invention of some comedian somewhere?
In any case, at the risk of playing the straight man, I have to point out the obvious: After being told that the nation was under attack, any competent, rational President would have stood up, quietly excused himself, and gone to lead the nation in response. That’s what it means to be the Commander-in-Chief.
As “Anon” pointed out up above, the scale of the attack was still very much an unknown at the time that Bush was sitting in the classroom. It was very possible that there were more planes in the air on their way to targets. Any president worthy of the office would have immediately gone into action, gathering information, strengthening our defenses, and guiding the military and civilian responses.
It’s possible that those seven wasted minutes would have made no difference, but it’s all too easy to imagine scenarios where those minutes could have cost hundreds or even thousands of lives. To cite one obvious example, only the President has the authority to order military fighter jets to shoot down civilian passenger airlines. If another jet had been flying toward another crowded building, the paralysis of this President in the face of danger could have been devastating.
As it was, Bush and Cheney later claimed to have spoken on the phone, and they claimed that Bush gave Cheney the authority to shoot down such planes. After examining the evidence, the 9/11 Commission made it very clear that there was no evidence to support the idea that such a phone call ever took place. In short, the President failed to do his duty in a time of crisis and he later told lies to cover up his inaction.
Every American should be outraged by George W. Bush’s complete failure of leadership on September 11th.
PS: I do have to disagree with Anon on one thing though: I thought “Fahrenheit 9/11” absolutely rocked. I loved it.
Todd
Yes, I first heard this canard about the infamous “7 minutes” on “Hardball” a few months ago. One of the “nonpartisan” 9/11 widows kept going on and on about how Bush “was reading a story while the buildings were going down” or some such crap. Even Chris Matthews, not exactly a Bush partisan, was dumbstruck and asked this woman…”So what? What’s your point? What’s this have to do with anything?”
I just don’t get it. Did anyone really have a problem with this until Michael Moore brought it up? Do people not remember what that day was like?
It doesn’t do Bush much credit that he froze for a few minutes, but for God’s sake Bush-bashers, don’t you realize this was the first time in history a president was caught on tape after a major catastrophe? I’ve read about FDR’s reaction to Pearl Harbor, and it wasn’t pretty. There’s plenty of things to bash Bush about, but this ain’t one of them…Jesus, get a grip!
Gary Farber
“Do you think if he had freaked out and run out of the classroom, we would now have Osama bin Laden in custody?”
Excluded Middle.
Gary Farber
jjacitelli says:”The very fact that you are criticizing the Pres. over this latest talking point proves that you are very partisan. I don’t need a crystal ball to see that.”
Or, clearly, mere logic.
Guilt-by-association. “Guilt by Association is a fallacy in which a person rejects a claim simply because it is pointed out that people she dislikes accept the claim.”