Posted on 09/11/2001 2:32:16 PM PDT by Utah Girl
President Bush was abruptly plunged into the deepest crisis of his brief period in office on Tuesday and how he responds may well determine his political fate.
Intelligence failures. Hijackers penetrating airport security. Failure to protect secure airspace over the Pentagon. Finding the perpetrators. Punishing them.
Those were among the stunning challenges facing Bush in the face of the shocking use of hijacked commercial U.S. jets to crash and topple New York's twin World Trade Towers and collapse part of the Pentagon outside Washington.
With searing television images of smoke clouds and panicked people fleeing burning buildings, a president unable to return to Washington for security reasons, people across the country were asking, ``How can this happen in America?''
The headline on the official White House transcript of Bush's first words on the attacks was amazingly stark: ``Remarks by the president after two planes crash into World Trade Center.''
Somehow, the bickering in Washington over how to prod life into the U.S. economy and who was to blame for losing the federal budget surplus seemed a distant tune from a bygone age of relative innocence.
The day began innocently enough for Bush. He was up before dawn to jog on a golf course at a clip of about 7.5 minutes per mile, ending his run dripping with sweat and smiling. He was to spend the morning talking about education at an elementary school.
PRESIDENT FLIES AROUND
Upon hearing of the disasters, Bush abruptly flew to an air base in Louisiana and then on to a similar facility in Nebraska because it was not considered safe to return to the White House.
Bush looked shaken by the magnitude of the crisis when he spoke to reporters in Louisiana.
``The resolve of our great nation is being tested,'' Bush said from Barksdale Air Force Base. ``But make no mistake: We will show the world that we will pass this test.''
Bush has been in office only eight months and the events of Tuesday morning figured to mark a turning point for the rest of his presidency, challenging him to prove whether he can handle such a crisis.
His predecessor Bill Clinton was praised for rising to the occasion of the previous worst act of terrorism in the United States, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in which 168 people died.
Americans typically rally around the president in times of crisis, as they did with his father in 1990-91 when President George Bush turned back Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
In the case of the son, however, Bush carries the baggage of not having won the popular vote in last year's election, taking office only on the strength of a divided Supreme Court decision after a protracted, bitter struggle with Democrat Al Gore over the state of Florida.
If the immediate past is any guide, the U.S. response will be as quick as targets can be identified. After twin attacks on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya on Aug. 7, 1998, President Bill Clinton waited only days before sending missiles flying at suspected terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a facility in Sudan that Washington called a chemical factory.
The incident could well force Bush to refocus U.S. policy to solving the bloodshed in the Middle East. The U.S. position has been basically to let violence between the Palestinians and Israel burn itself out before starting a new peace initiative, to the great frustration of the Palestinians, who consider Washington tilting too far toward the Israeli side.
There has been some speculation Bush might have been planning to hold his first-ever meeting with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat during a trip to the U.N. General Assembly in New York later this month, but now even that visit to debris-scattered Manhattan is in doubt.
The United States appeared to have been caught completely unawares by the tragedy in spite of today's ongoing concerns about terrorism.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the president did not know of any warnings of this attack. Asked whether Bush was concerned that such a severe attack happened with no warning, he said:
``First things first, his concern is with the ... health and security of the American people and with the families of those who have lost their lives. There will come an appropriate time to do all appropriate lookbacks. His focus is on events this morning.''
The facility in the Sudan was an aspirin factory, the cruise missile attack on the terrorists in Afghanistan proved futile. However, you may recall, Clinton was on vacation on Martha's Vineyard ... and Lewinski scandal was in full bloom ... he needed to divert public attention and in that regard he succeeded.
May all their back-stabbing come back to haunt them and their DNC puppeteers in the coming elections.
It disgusts me to know that the liberal media is trying to score political points on the worst day in American history.
I hope that's true -- because Bush will respond just fine. I think we're just danged lucky that he's the one who's at the helm right now.
"His predecessor Bill Clinton was praised for rising to the occasion of the previous worst act of terrorism in the United States, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in which 168 people died."Clinton also used the occasion to take a cheap shot at Rush Limbaugh and his conservative opponents. I don't expect Bush to stoop that low.
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