A Brief Thought About That Moment When President Bush Learns of the 9/11 Attacks

I watched this video again recently.

When it first played I had friends who saw it as evidence of the president’s dimness. Perhaps I felt something along those lines, as well. Fortunately for the sake of self-esteem if not accuracy, we tend to gloss over evidence of our own prejudices…

Of course there was a lot of prejudice going on. Still is, in all sorts of directions. I recall a painful conversation with someone who cited this moment as proof the president was stupid and who then immediately launched into the labyrinthine conspiracy theory that Bush had actually ordered the attack – a muddle of contradiction consistent with the deterioration of rationality and, frankly, decency associated with the rat hole of conspiracy thinking…

(I gather it is common knowledge in large swaths of the Muslim world that no Jews were killed in the Twin Towers. More recently the nastiness of the “birther” conspiracy has widened into stories repeated at gun shows and in fundamentalist churches around the country that President Obama has ordered the secret construction of concentration camps… Go here or a pretty good reflection on Conspiracy Theories. But I digress…)

Here’s my bottom line about those horrible hours and how the president heard about it revealed for those who care all to watch, over and over again…

I think George Bush’s presidency was a failure. I think the range of his administration’s response to that attack on American soil by Islamic fundamentalist jihadists, including a frightening embrace of torture abroad and mind numbing assertions of presidential authority at home, all muddied further by his willful digression to the side show of Iraq, squandering lives and resources while likely creating an even more dangerous region than before his invasion, will earn him the condemnation of history.

But that’s the future from this video.

As I watch him in those agonizing minutes following the secret service agent’s whisper into his ear, I feel a wave of sorrow for him, confused, not knowing what to do, as the minutes drag on. Here what it means to be the decider present, full and ugly. And the reality that no one, no one is up for this job…

Watching those horrific moments, I feel so sorry for him.

And for what will follow, for all of us; for that my sadness spreads like pooling blood following a gunshot wound…