The outcry over the first series of political commercials for President
George W. Bush was swift and heartfelt. Using images of victims of the
9/11 attacks and firefighters responding to the emergency at the World
Trade Center, the ads trumpeted President Bush's "steady" leadership.
Families of the victims and representatives of the firefighters charged
that the White House is using 9/11 to advance a political agenda. Former
New York mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to deflect this criticism by
emphasizing that Bush's leadership has been steady. But the commercials
themselves beg the question: What did President Bush do on 9/11?
Giuliani himself framed the Bush question this way: "His leadership on
that day is central to his record."

Over the weekend that followed initial broadcast of the Bush campaign
commercials, both sides took positions on the appropriateness of their
content. Democrats protested the imagery. President Bush, who in January
2002, when seeking an extra budget appropriation for his war on
terrorism, had told congressional leaders, "I have no ambition
whatsoever to use this as a political issue," backed away from that
undertaking. From his Crawford, Texas, ranch on March 6 Bush declared,
"I will continue to speak about the effects of 9/11 on our country and
my presidency." Echoing Rudy Giuliani, Bush added, "How this
administration handled that day, as well as the war on terror, is worthy
of discussion."

A leader marches to the sound of the guns. George Washington, Robert E.
Lee or Napoleon would have done that. Rudy Giuliani did do that. After
the first plane struck the Twin Towers, he went immediately to the World
Trade Center and helped supervise emergency efforts there. But what
exactly did George W. Bush do?

On that crystalline day in September, President Bush was at the Emma
Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla. Bush was to participate in a
conference and some reading demonstrations in support of his "No Child
Left Behind" education program. Learning of the terrorist attacks,
President Bush made a brief televised statement in which he said he had
spoken to Vice President Dick Cheney, FBI director Robert Mueller and
New York Governor George Pataki. He called the terrorists "folks" and
promised a full investigation. Then he left for the airport.

Air Force One was wheels up from Sarasota at 9:57 a.m., a little over 20
minutes after Bush's first statement. At that point, the president, the
commander-in-chief, had three choices. Bush could have returned to
Washington, where the Pentagon had also been hit by one of the terrorist
planes, and where the president had told the nation he was headed. Bush
could have gone to New York City, which had sustained the most grievous
blows in the 9/11 attacks. What he chose – the third option – was to
flee somewhere else to refuel, then remain in the air. The president's
plane flew to Barksdale Air Force Base outside Shreveport, La. By
choosing to fly to a remote location far away from the site of the
attacks, Bush acquiesced to the demands of his security people. At the
moment of the initial decision, there was still some reason for the
moving out of danger, because one of the terrorist aircrafts, Flight 77,
was still airborne, but it crashed in Pennsylvania at 10:10 a.m., only a
few minutes into Bush's flight.

Did Bush march to the sound of the guns? Did he go to New York where his
presence would have been the symbol of a nation unbowed? No. Instead, at
about 10:40 a.m., when Air Force One picked up a fighter escort near
Jacksonville, Bush accepted Cheney's advice not to return immediately to
Washington.

Because every aircraft over the United States except official planes got
orders to land, air traffic controllers and military air defense
commanders could verify within a few hours that the airborne terrorist
threat had ended. Certainly the situation had been clarified by 12:36,
when Bush spoke again to the nation from Barksdale, looking flustered on
television but promising the United States would track down the
perpetrators. An hour later Air Force One was back in the air – the real
situation clearer yet – but Bush flew to Offutt Air Force Base at Omaha,
headquarters of the Air Combat Command, not to either Washington or New
York. Offutt had a secure command post where Bush could teleconference
with his top national security people, but he could have done that even
more easily in Washington. Only late in the day did the president return
to the East coast. He stepped onto White House grounds at about 7:00
that evening.

Three days after the attacks, President Bush finally went to New York.
This sorry record is not one of steady leadership, nor does it show a
decisive president willing to override poor advice.

The official record of Presidents of the United States, the Weekly
Compilation of Presidential Documents, which would have to have recorded
Bush's statements of the morning and afternoon of 9/11, never appeared
for the week of September 11, 2001. The remarks appeared only much later
on the White House website. President Bush also went to extraordinary
lengths to shield from public scrutiny his inaction on the terrorist
threat before 9/11, including denial of documents to congressional
investigators and a public commission, the use of secrecy rules to
suppress embarrassing information and the manipulation of the scope of
inquiry and its deadline to ensure investigators had minimal time in
which to review the key issue of Bush's leadership on terrorism.

In contrast to this disturbing performance, George Bush went on to take
every opportunity to harness 9/11 in service of his political agenda,
contrary to his own promises of 2002. A carefully orchestrated World
Trade Center speech on the first anniversary of the attacks, the use of
the Statue of Liberty as backdrop for a 9/11 commemoration a year later,
now the Bush political ads. This is leadership of a different kind.

By John Prados, TomPaine.com
March 12, 2004

"Jim" wrote in message

Do you even own a boat?

Jim: Must you start every one of your off-topic threads with a
copyright violation? It's one thing to point people to an article
with an excerpt and a source (a link is nice). But when all you do is
post articles, in their entirity, without any comment, you simply look
like you don't have an original thought in your head.

How many on-topic post have you made in the last seven days?

Why do you need to copy entire articles, in violation of copyrights,
to rec.boats. There are hundreds of newsgroups where this stuff is
on-topic, why don't you go to one of those groups?

On 3/23/04 5:51 PM, in article
, "Curtis CCR"
wrote:

Jim: Must you start every one of your off-topic threads with a
copyright violation? It's one thing to point people to an article
with an excerpt and a source (a link is nice). But when all you do is
post articles, in their entirity, without any comment, you simply look
like you don't have an original thought in your head.

How many on-topic post have you made in the last seven days?

Why do you need to copy entire articles, in violation of copyrights,
to rec.boats. There are hundreds of newsgroups where this stuff is
on-topic, why don't you go to one of those groups?

It would appear that I jumped the gun after looking at only a couple of
Jim's most recent posts. Jim has been pretty good about posting only
excerpts and providing links. Appears to be respecting copyrights. His
reposting of of stuff from ThomasPaine is done with permission - they allow
it.

Severing that from the rest of my questions. They are still valid. And I
still wonder about whether Jim has an original thought in his head.