[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Originally Posted by transplant99

Nor do your local paper reviews.

No-one's making you read them. If you'd care to enter into, you know--a debate, where you address specific points and try to have an intelligent conversation, I'm game. I'm not, on the other hand, very interested in a flame war. I'm getting a bit too old for those kinds of immature antics.

As for the comment about how long it took the administration to respond. If you watch United 93 (a film I didn't love--but you can at least say that it's meticulous when it comes to the details) you'll see that it isn't just the president. The FAA and the military BOTH attempted to contact the White House in order to receive instructions on how to deal with what both knew was a crisis. They received NO guidance, because that guidance could apparently come only from the President, who was INCOMMUNICADO.

Obviously, no-one could have predicted 9/11. But to say that no-one could have predicted ANY scenario in which the nation's commander in chief would need to be contacted immediately is just silly.

That's not to say that it would have been different with a different president--just that the bureaucracy got caught with its pants down which is neither controversial, nor an indictment of Mr. Bush specifically. The 7 minutes, though it made for good television in Michael Moore's documentary, is irrelevant. And note that this is what I was saying all along:

One of the embarrassing things for the Bush administration is that it took them so long to react to what was happening. The famous "7 minutes" is a damning indictment of the President himself--clearly not knowing what to do. But still worse is that it took the better part of an hour for anyone in the administration to do anything at all, even AFTER they knew what was happening.

I suppose I could have avoided getting flamed if I had added "the 7 munutes is irrelevant." And it is. Nothing substantial could have been done by then anyway. By the time Bush was notified that there was a problem, the bureaucracy had already reacted too slowly.

If it makes people feel better to think that I'm desperate to hate Bush, so be it. I'll admit that I'm not a fan of his. However, I don't think this particular screw-up falls in his lap--just in the lap of his administration. Would another administration have reacted the same way? Maybe. Probably, even. But it doesn't matter, because the onus was on this group, not the Clinton administration, or Bush 41. When you're the one in power, you're the one who gets to take the blame.