My Pet President

One thing that Moore's movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, already seems to have accomplished is that it has made the public at large aware of the footage of Bush sitting in the classroom without doing anything for several long minutes after being told that the United States is under attack. Cyberspace political junkies have long been aware of this footage: people who get their news from TV and newspapers haven't been. Until now. Thanks to Michael Moore.

Incidentally, if you haven't seen the video, it's been available in cyberspace for two years. The full version, in Quicktime (25mb), is here, and an excerpted version, in Real Player (7mb), is here.

If you want proof that the media certainly is not liberal and certainly IS clueless, think about the fact that there has been endless coverage of Bush and 9/11; 9/11 and Bush; what Bush did on 9/11; how 9/11 defined Bush; ad nauseam. And ask yourself how come, amid all this coverage, there has been footage of Bush at the moment that he was told that we were under attack - but not one major news channel thought it might be interesting to actually show it?

But one thing that is largely escaping attention is that Bush didn't just sit there after knowing that the second plane hit: he had not yet started his photo-op when the first plane hit and yet he still chose to continue with his photo-op instead of taking some action.

He didn't know it was a terrorist attack at that point? Maybe, but he certainly knew that a major disaster had just hit the downtown area of the nation's largest city, but he didn't think it was worth interrupting a photo-op for.

And it's assumed that he didn't know it was a terrorist attack, but I'm not so sure. I didn't know it was an attack yet. You didn't know it was an attack yet. But those in power MUST have known it: because they certainly DID know that the plane that had hit the skyscraper had been hijacked.

To you and me, it was a perfectly normal morning. To the Pentagon, the Strategic Air Command and the White House, it was a morning where there had been four planes hijacked. You don't think that got somebody's attention? You don't think they realized that something was up?

And then one of the hijacked planes hit a skyscraper. And they knew that there were three other hijacked planes in the sky, one on a trajectory to New York, and one to DC.

So how the hell could they not have realized it was an attack? An idiot would connect those dots.

But Bush decided to go into an elementary school classroom and read My Pet Goat, instead.

And then he tried to spin his actions as heroic.