Bush doesn’t seem to be able to tie his shoes without someone telling him how to do it, when to do it, or which camera to gaze with serious intent into while doing it.
PR mistake? The President could have done anything he wanted in those seven minutes. He’s The President. There are only two reasons I can think of he’d act as dumb as a brick for those seven minutes.
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His advisors told him to stay put while they handle things. Considering which advisors were really on the scene, mainly PR types, I don’t think that’s likely. It’s possible Secret Service told him to sit still and this would be in keeping with the chicken-with-its-head-cut-off running around the country our leader did while everyone else in the world was wondering why the heck Karen Hughes, a vapid hack if there ever was one, was the figure rallying our country while its president hid out.
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He didn’t know what to do and figured sitting still until someone told him was the safest move.
Personally I think it was a bit of both. What it wasn’t was that The President was in the middle of something more important or that should have aroused his immediate attention and focus.
Bush doesn’t seem to be able to tie his shoes without someone telling him how to do it, when to do it, or which camera to gaze with serious intent into while doing it.
PR mistake? The President could have done anything he wanted in those seven minutes. He’s The President. There are only two reasons I can think of he’d act as dumb as a brick for those seven minutes.
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His advisors told him to stay put while they handle things. Considering which advisors were really on the scene, mainly PR types, I don’t think that’s likely. It’s possible Secret Service told him to sit still and this would be in keeping with the chicken-with-its-head-cut-off running around the country our leader did while everyone else in the world was wondering why the heck Karen Hughes, a vapid hack if there ever was one, was the figure rallying our country while its president hid out.
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He didn’t know what to do and figured sitting still until someone told him was the safest political move.
Personally I think it was a bit of both. What it wasn’t was that The President was in the middle of something more important or that should have aroused his immediate attention and focus. And it sure wasn’t, as his operatives would put forth now, a calculated attempt to show strength and composure. He was reading a kindergarten book about Goats. This is an image designed to rally confidence and intimidate our enemies?
Prove what point? You have a primary premise, that Bush was ineffectual and displayed poor leadership in the early minutes of 9/11. This can be partly evaluated by examining the timeline and information available and reactions, but it is also largely a matter of subjective opinion.
From that, you make the specific implication that there was a possibility for the President to have affected the outcome of Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon. As we have demonstrated, that was impossible.
What if the president stands up, first thing he says to the staff - scramble all military jets to protect potential targets? What happens then?
So, in a nutshell, you would have felt better about Bush if he had immediately given a redundant, useless and potentially dangerous order?
Lets break that down. First, even on 9/11, it was standard response to scramble fighters in response to a hijacking. This does not require a Presidential order, it is standing procedure at a lower-leve. Fighters were in the air in response to the New York planes by the time Bush had received any word about a plane hitting the WTC, much less the second.
Now, on 9/11 there were only 7 active response stations with 2 planes on alert. That’s a grand total of 14 fighters for the entire country. And you can bet they are laid out in such a fashion that, by and large, only 2 planes for a specific region. With limited flight time and the ability to only be in one place at once sending your only fighters aloft with no idea of where to send them is useless. Sending fighters into the crowded DC airspace with no information about potential threat planes is also useless.
You are critizing the President for not issuing orders which could only be issued in response to specific information where that information once received on a lower level automatically resulted in those orders. It’s not “Mr. President, there might be a plane headed towards Washington, do you want to intercept with fighters?” it’s “Mr. President, there might be a plane headed towards Washington, two F-16s from Langley have been scrambled to intercept”. There was never ANY command possibility of the President having to make a choice of whether or not to shoot down Flight 77, much less the New York planes.
You are just breaking down the timeline of a country in confusion with no clear leader. You are saying exactly what i am saying, with no clear leadership, the only thing that could happen, happened.
No, I am saying you are a fool. The opportunity to provide leadership began for the President at 9:30 when he addressed the nation.
You can’t lead or make decisions without information. The FAA gets both an A+ and an F all at once. On one hand, the moment Central Command realized it isn’t an isolated incident they ordered the immediate ground stop and then the immediate diversion of all US air traffic to the nearest airport. They didn’t have to wait on a decision from the President to do it, they just did it. On the other hand, they dropped the ball in getting notice to the military about Flight 77 and Flight 93. At a higher level there is no possiblity for the Air Force or the President to compensate for that.
I suppose you’d probably try to make the argument that the President should have figuratively or literally strolled into an empty room and started banging on a speakerphone and demanding answers or information. That was already happening. And you have to let people do their job. Tasking and communication through several layers of agencies and people has latencies on the order of minutes.
So thanks!
I’m done. You’re incredible. I hadn’t realized until now that there was a bozo-bit on top of the bozo-bit. You can pat yourself on the back and feel better about yourself knowing that you have no capacity for rational or critical thought, but can still retain a smug sense of emotional superiority because you know you have a huge brain, and all others are mere fools before you. I’ve seen more detailed arguments out of a Cindysue, just as clueless only without the gigantic ego.
To the bush backers, what were the low level people trained to do, how much information did they have? Oh wait, they didn’t train on this even though the month previously bush had a terror memo sent to him titled - ‘Bin Laden determined to strike in the US’ and it talked about flying planes into buildings.
That was a presidential brief. That did not make the rounds. The “low level” guys had not read it. That is like saying while you are working to fix the server that is down when you never got the memo that the servers will now be powered by hamsters. So the first thing you do when you open the computer case is throw out all the hamsters. Wouldn’t you like your boss to call you first, before you kill the hamsters and tell you - “hey, if you see hamsters in the box, don’t kill them, they power the server”
In a situation like this, you cannot count on low level workers because they do not have perspective, only Bush and a few people on his “team” did. Only they had the information available that something like this might happen, they are the only ones on the morning of Sept 11 who should not have been running around with their heads cut-off.
And that is where a real leader could have stepped up and plugged in the information he was privy to and take action.
Chet
Linoleum, why don’t you just post - ditto - after my posts? Actually here, let me post for you for my following post.
“Ditto - but fuck the democrats, Bush rules - USA USA USA.”
There you go, saved you the typing.
Chet
How is it subjective? He did nothing. That is the definition of ineffectual and poor leadership in a crisis.
You can try and whip his inaction into whatever confection you’d like, but in the end you’re trying to build up an argument based on the idea that total inaction was the correct response, and that’s nonsensical on its face. Our emperor was naked! Naked! Ass hanging out, dick flapping in the wind!
He’s the leader of the free world, not a middle manager caught in a fire drill. The job of a leader is to evaluate the situation using the material he has. If nothing else he could have spent that time getting situation reports.
Doing nothing is doing nothing. And there’s nothing subjective about it.
Would it be ok if he was in the Oval Office when this happened and they came in and told him and he waited 7 minutes to react?
“Sir, we’ve been attacked.”
“Ok, gimme about 7 minutes. “Who’s the Boss?” is almost over. Goddamn, who knew Alyssa Milano would grow up to be so hot!?”
Which he was from 9:15 onward. And not getting any useful information before speaking to the public at 9:30. We are talking about a timespan of less than a half hour. Reality is not like the movies, as the analysis of events and information flow clearly show. If you are waiting to get situation reports to understand what is going on, you’re inherently doing nothing because you don’t know what is going on.
Here is a simple exercise. Look at the report. Consider the chain of events and the resulting action and communication. What, if anything would have been different if Bush had been not at a classroom in Florida, but sitting in the Oval Office in DC? The reality is, not very much.
I suppose you’d probably try to make the argument that the President should have figuratively or literally strolled into an empty room and started banging on a speakerphone and demanding answers or information.
What’s the point of having a president who served as a fighter pilot in the ANG if he can’t strap himself into an F/A-18 and take on the evil-doers himself, leading from the front with the Battle Hymn of the Republic blaring from some conveniently mounted speakers? Bush could learn a thing or two from Roland Emmerich on how to stage manage his public appearances. You think Bill Pullman would have sat in a kindergarten class reading ‘The Adventures of Grumpy Goat’ while all hell was breaking loose? Hell no!
The middle of a crisis is no time to screw off at work.
There is no “sitting on your ass in a time of disaster” merit badge, no matter how you try to parse it.
Here’s why: Because if something could have been done, he wouldn’t have been ready or able to do it.
Which he was from 9:15 onward. And not getting any useful information before speaking to the public at 9:30. We are talking about a timespan of less than a half hour. Reality is not like the movies, as the analysis of events and information flow clearly show. If you are waiting to get situation reports to understand what is going on, you’re inherently doing nothing because you don’t know what is going on.
Meanwhile decisions were being made, but not by Bush. Questions were being answered, but not by Bush. Even if he had been on the phone telling people to calm down and wait for further instructions, that the leader of the free world was in charge of the situation, it would have shown leadership.
Instead we got nothing. Not comforting.
While I tend to agree that there was nothing Bush could do to stop any other attacks, does anyone think Rudy Guiliani sat around for 7 minutes before starting to do… something?
Should he have harassed and interrupted already-busy subordinates, thereby interfering with their ability to do their job. Perhaps he could have given random orders before he knew what was going on? It show surprising (For Bush) poise to finish the public appearance and withdraw gracefully.
As has been stated several times the job of POTUS is not a fast-response job. There are no minute-to-minute operations to oversee. Lower level people do all that. There was nothing immediate Bush (or anyone else in the office of President) could have done right then.
Here’s a fun exercise for the Bush-wasted-an-uber-critical-7-minutes crowd. Compare the speed to which Bush responded to 9/11 to Roosevelts response to Pearl Harbor.
Are any of you “do nothing” advocates actual managers of actual human beings?
I’m genuinely curious.
Roosevelt was having lunch with Harry Hopkins when he was told. I’m fairly certain he didn’t tell his advisors “Ok, thanks for letting me know. Dessert’s almost here, and after I finish that, I’ll head on over.”
How much you wanna bet he got his ass up, said “Excuse me,” and split?
It may be a “fun” exercise, but it’s not in the slightest bit informative. The world nowadays is much faster, and things are much more interconnected. The entire machinery, both of government and of armed defense, moves much more quickly now than it did in 1941. So in 7 minutes FDR couldn’t have made a lick of difference… not even in theory. Bush (again, in theory) could have.
And as for your lame example about how you don’t pester your employees when a computer server goes down… of course not! The technicians (or programmers, or sysadmins, or whatever you want to call them) don’t require your authorization to do things, nor do they usually require extra resources which you can put at their disposal. In fact, you’re pretty much irrelevant to the whole fixing of the server.
The machinations of governement, however, do (or at least should) require the head of the government to give authorizations, make decisions, and so on and so forth. Honestly, Nick. Do you really need the difference between software technicians and governmental employees pointed out to you?
It may be a “fun” exercise, but it’s not in the slightest bit informative. The world nowadays is much faster, and things are much more interconnected. The entire machinery, both of government and of armed defense, moves much more quickly now than it did in 1941. So in 7 minutes FDR couldn’t have made a lick of difference… not even in theory. Bush (again, in theory) could have. [/quote]
The world nowadays is not much faster. I realize that communications technologies are much more prevalent and advanced now than in the 1940s but that doesn’t mean human beings are any different. My argument is (and remains) that a complex organization of humans reacts in certain ways to a crisis requiring fast response. If there is no practiced, procedural, and rehearsed response available then some confusion and panic is inevitable. This is not a state that can be repaired by a sudden influx of orders or requests for reports from people removed from the immediate situation. The only recipe is for the people on the spot to take stock and then take the immediate corrective actions available.
The differences are both obvious and irrelevant to the point I was making. Which apparently you missed. In crisis situations the people who are in position to make a difference must do so immediately regardless of authorizations. The people who are not involved at that operational level should avoid getting in the way and slowing the process up.
I can’t imagine a way to make this more obvious. Linoleum has presented the timelines and facts, look at what happened. Nobody waited for authorization from a Presidential level. Nobody. The FAA did their thing, NORAD did their thing, the firefighters and cops in NY did their thing. The president could have leapt up, run for air force one, and gotten a seven minute head start on his speech. That’s about all he could have done with those seven minutes.
I brought up WWII to bring up some other examples of presidential reactions to crisises. From all acounts I’ve read, Roosevelt didn’t “leap into action” when he heard about Pearl Harbor while having lunch. He spent all afternoon listening to reports and advisers and composed his now-famous speech in the evening. In that afternoon and evening I’m sure he wasted more than 7 minutes on bathroom breaks, smoking cigarettes, and other such things.
I’m not aware of any authorizations or big decisions he had to make that had any immediate impact. His decision to push for a declaration of war had a long term impact but I can’t find any historical accounts that imply that he had any immediate impact on the situation at Pearl Harbor.
Yes, FDR jumped to his feet and ran out of the room.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Anyway, are you guys really arguing about 7 minutes? Jesus.
I personally believe that a President who cannot think on his feet opens himself to being “lead from below” by other members within his administration who can think quicker, and tend to influence decisions more than they should.