Reply #4: I have one major disagreement with this editorial

[kcwayne]

Tonight we do not need Mr. Bush to remind us that he went to ground zero and spoke through a bullhorn. It was a fine gesture that any president would have made. As far as judging his leadership, it is as irrelevant as the famous extra minutes he spent in a classroom in Florida during a reading of "The Pet Goat" after the World Trade Center was attacked.

The famous extra minutes are not irrelevant. The funding for the Saudi terrorists was about $500,000. What if some nation with millions to apply had conceived using Al Queda as Bush wrongly asserted Iraq had done? Suppose they had planned to hijack 100 planes, and blow up chemical facilities and attack nuclear reactors all throughout the country with a team of 1000 terrorists?

At the time Bush was informed we were under attack, no one knew what the scale of the attack would be. It was essential that Bush give the order to down civilian aircraft in the event that there were more hijacked planes in the air. It was equally imperative that he put in motion a national defense plan to react to the current threat. I presume he had no such plan for this type of event, which is another topic, but this is an essential responsibility of the civilian leadership.

His failure to do so was catastrophic, and if our enemies had organized a larger threat, tens of thousands more people could have died while Bush read My Pet Goat and hung around for 20 minutes of photo op. A more stark case of incompetence and failure by a President has never been witnessed. This is hardly irrelevant.