1. Why it’s so hard for some people (liberals mostly) to see that defeating the terrorists in Iraq is the war on terror. We’re fighting terror and terrorists. They are terrorists. This is not hard. Now whether we should be fighting in Iraq can be debated, but it seems clear that fighting the terrorists in Iraq is part of the war on terror.
2. Why some people (again, mostly liberals) say that Bush was a “shrub” and sat dumfounded when given the news on 9/11 (in a bad way). I watched that video clip again last night, of Bush reading to children, then Andrew Card coming in and whispering to him. And he sat there for a minute, with this look on his face. A look that seems, to me, to be a mixture of disbelief, shock, horror, and a keen awareness of a room full of people looking at him. The video I watched last night cut from that clip back to a clip of people in NY at the same time. Those people looked the same way. Shock, horror, and that look that people get when they just don’t know how to process something.
If Bush WAS dumbfounded, uh, who can blame him? Who wasn’t? When I finally turned on the TV when I got home, I sat completely unmoving for three hours, staring in utter disbelief.
I think Bush handled himself really well that day. He remained calm. He took a moment to gather his wits. He finished what he was doing as quickly as he could without inciting panic, then excused himself and sprang into action.
I think I read an article one day while waiting for some bloodwork to be finished. It was an interview with Bush and Laura. He spoke a bit about that day, and even though the words were typed, you could understand how hard that day was for him. Ugh. I can’t imagine.
3. Searching for a relevant link for this post ( didn’t find one), I stumbled across this page. It goes on about this quite a bit more than what I’ve pasted below. Interesting.
Bush awoke a little before 6:00 a.m. on September 11, pulled on shorts and an old T-shirt and laced up his running shoes. [CBS, 11/1/02] At 6:30 a.m., Bush, a reporter friend, and his Secret Service crew took a four-mile jog in the half-light of dawn around a nearby golf course. [Washington Post, 1/27/02, Washington Post, 09/11/01]
At about the same time Bush was getting ready for his jog, a van carrying several Middle Eastern men pulled up to the Colony’s guard station. The men said they were a television news crew with a scheduled “poolside” interview with the president. They asked for a certain Secret Service agent by name. The message was relayed to a Secret Service agent inside the resort, who hadn’t heard of the agent mentioned or of plans for an interview. He told the men to contact the president’s public relations office in Washington, DC, and had the van turned away. [Longboat Observer, 9/26/01]
The Secret Service may have foiled an assassination attempt. Two days earlier, Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, had been murdered by a similar ruse. Two North African men, posing as journalists from “Arabic News International,” had been requesting an interview with Massoud since late August. Ahmad Jamsheed, Massoud’s secretary, said that by the night of September 8, “they were so worried and excitable, they were begging us.” An interview was arranged for the following day. As it began, a bomb hidden in the video camera exploded, killing the two journalists. Massoud was rushed by helicopter to a hospital in Tajikistan, but was pronounced dead on arrival (although his death was not acknowledged until September 15). [International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, 10/30/01, Newsday, 10/26/01] The assassination is widely believed to have been timed to remove the Taliban’s most popular and respected opponent in anticipation of the backlash that would occur after the 9/11 attacks. [BBC, 9/10/01, BBC, 9/10/01 (B), Time, 8/4/02, St. Petersburg Times, 9/9/02] The Northern Alliance blamed al-Qaeda and the ISI, Pakistan’s secret service, for the attacks. [Radio Free Europe, 9/10/01, Newsday, 9/15/01, Reuters, 10/4/01]
The View From Here 