Bill Maher article/Bush on Larry King
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| Fri, 08-13-2004 - 8:35am |
Also, saw Bush on Larry King last night. The guy can't pass up a chance to say 9/11. Too bad he didn't have anything else to say and Larry was lobbing him softball questions with no real follow-up. Good thing Laura was there too. She made Bush's fumblings less obvious. I think overall this was a warm-up for convention or debates. Very weak interview, but it's nice to see George step out of his safe Republican scripted campiagn spots. Too bad the press can't really press him for real answers.
Bush blew it the morning of 9/11
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/story/221433p-190107c.html
By BILL MAHER
John Kerry has waded into an issue raised by Michael Moore in his film "Fahrenheit 9/11," namely, President Bush's sitting for seven minutes in a Florida classroom after being told "the country is under attack." Republicans are waxing indignant, of course. But the criticism is richly deserved.
The fact that Bush wasted 27 minutes that day - not only the seven minutes reading to kids but 20 more at a photo op afterward - was, in my view, the most outrageous thing a President has done since Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court.
Watergate was outrageous but it still did not carry the possibility of utter devastation, like a President's freezing at the very moment we needed his immediate focus on an attack on the United States.
This is an issue about the ultimate presidential duty, acting in an emergency. If nothing else in Washington is nonpartisan, this should be.
But it is not. Republicans are tying themselves in knots trying to defend Bush's actions that morning. The excuses they put forward are absurd:
He was "gathering his thoughts." This was a moment a President should have imagined a thousand times. There is no time in the nuclear age for a President to sit like Forrest Gump "gathering thoughts" after an attack has begun. Gathering information is what he should have been doing.
From the White House press secretary: "The President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening." I agree that gaining a better understanding of what was happening should have been his goal. What I don't get is how that goal was reached by just sitting there instead of getting up and talking to people. Is he a psychic? Was he receiving the information telepathically?
"He didn't want to scare the children." Vice President Cheney has said of Kerry, "The senator from Massachusetts has given us ample reason to doubt the judgment he brings to vital issues of national security." So Kerry's judgment is suspect, but at a moment of national crisis, Bush's judgment was: Better not to scare 20 children momentarily than to react immediately to an attack on the country!
If he had just said, "Hey, kids, gotta go do some President business - be good to your moms and dads, bye!" my guess is the kids would have survived.
I cannot see how someone who considers himself a conservative can defend George Bush's inaction. Conservatives pride themselves on being clear-eyed and decisive. They don't do nuance, and they respect toughness.
But Bush choked at the most important moment a President could have. We're lucky Al Qaeda had done its worst by the time he pulled himself away from the photo op. Next time, it might not be that way.
Maher is the host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher."

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< Second, Bush did not let his staff handle "everything." The Bush staff's main function after the second plane hit was to gather information, and that's what they were doing. >
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This is not the only source of information, by the way. There have been a number of television shows that have video, pictures, and other eyewitness reports on what the president and his staff were doing. The book is just a good summary of all of that. It details how, after Bush's 7 minutes in the classroom, he walked into the next room where his staff had already set up a kind of temporary, portable command center and were in the middle of gathering information when he arrived.
Bill Sammon is Senior White House Correspondent for the Washington Times, a political analyst for the Fox News Channel, and the author of the New York Times bestsellers At Any Cost and Fighting Back. He lives in Maryland with his wife, Becky, and their five teenagers, Brittany, Brooke, Ben, Billy, and Blair.
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Anyone else notice that
Miffy - Co-CL For The Politics Today Board
I think Britt Hume has a very good show, and O'Reilly is Fox's version of Tim Russert, with a little added juice (as O'Reilly sometimes has a hard time controlling his temper).
When it comes to their news analysis, then this is a different story.
The Washington Times is far from being an ultra-left wing paper, but I will agree that it is more biased towards a Conservative side (perhaps slightly more to the right than the WSJ).
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