Bush's reaction to 9/11 was so appalling to me, I wanted to leave the
country. ..Bob Cesca puts it in better context than I.

Senator Jim Webb saw Bush's reaction to 9/11 ..and his lackeys like
George Allen.....so appalling, he had to enter poltics.

(PS Did you read about the Bush-JimWebb confrontation at the
WhiteHouse and the abhorrent cover Geoge Will gave the President? I
have now lost ALL respect for George Will. )

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/911-is-why-hes-the-wors_b_35465.html

Bob Cesca

12.03.2006
9/11 Is Why He's The Worst President Ever

In Sunday's Washington Post, Douglas Brinkley opened the official
public portion of the debate amongst historians as to whether
President Bush has been the worst president in American history.
Meanwhile, the debate on this topic has been on-going in the
blogosphere for as long as I can remember. Brinkley writes that it's
the Iraq War which will place George W. Bush amongst our worst
presidents and most of us from the blogs can agree that it's one of
the president's leading trespasses on a long, long list.

Iraq, in fact, is a terrible symptom of the president's horrifyingly
awful reaction to September 11. It is his mishandling of 9/11,
ultimately, that makes him not amongst our worst, but the worst
American president.

I've always held that anyone -- even a child -- would've reacted
similarly to President Bush during and after 9/11 in all aspects. His
stunned inaction during My Pet Goat in Florida; his initial
statements; his address before the joint session of Congress; the
invasion of Afghanistan; everything. All predictable, all textbook,
all ordinary. It was all too typical of President Bush's mediocre
nature: do what is basically expected, but not much else. And then,
rather than using 9/11 as a means to unify us all through humanitarian
legislation and positive, uplifting acts to truly change the world for
the better, the president instead exploited 9/11 with the goal of
consolidating executive power and selfishly indulging the foreign
policy whimsy of his associates.

Almost as tragic as the attacks themselves, President Bush turned the
nation and the world down a path of darkness, tragedy and more death.
America is more divided than it has been since the Civil War. Many
former allies disdain and merely tolerate us. It's difficult to image
now that the people of Iran -- an "axis of evil" nation -- held
massive candlelight vigils honoring our fallen citizens. As a result
of the president's 9/11 reactions, Republicans, in their defense of
the president, have tossed aside intellectual honesty, rationality and
thoughtfulness, while Democrats, with their patriotism constantly and
wrongfully at issue, have either acquiesced or have allowed formerly
important issues to sag under the weight of dealing with cleaning up
the president's mistakes.

Looking back at the last five years, I can't help but to compare our
recent history to a time travel movie in which the time-space
continuum has skewed into an alternate reality and the events that
should've happened after 9/11... simply never existed. In other words,
September 11 should have initiated an era of peace and collective
world unity. But through the president's incompetence, stubbornness,
ambition and greed, the polar opposite has occurred. For five years,
we've existed along a false timeline in which Biff Tannen is a wealthy
gambling kingpin -- his pearl-handled revolver aimed at Michael J
Fox's head.

I firmly believe that President Bush's incompetent actions from 9/11
through today will be viewed as one of the great historical "what
ifs." Imagine if Nixon had been president during the Cuban Missile
Crisis. Imagine if Stephen Douglas had defeated Lincoln and allowed
secession and continued slavery. Imagine if the French hadn't joined
us in our fight for independence. Since 9/11, it feels as if we've
lived through one of those dark what ifs.

Imagine if President Bush had been a better man and used 9/11 to
appeal to the better angels of our nature.

What if he hadn't withdrawn much of his financial pledge to help the
heroes of 9/11 with medical costs, and, now that they're no longer
useful in photo ops, has allowed them to die slow, choking deaths
mired in bankruptcy? What if the president had pledged as much money
and support for the surviving first responders as he has for
Halliburton and the Iraq War?

What if the president had kept his eye on Bin Laden rather than
pulling out, leaving Afghanistan to flounder and Bin Laden to escape
unharmed?

What if, like Lincoln (the president's unlikely roll model), the
president had used 9/11 as a catalyst to inaugurate an era of renewed
equality?

What if the president had preserved our liberties and worked in a
bipartisan way in Washington, rather than chiseling away our rights
and destroying the national unity that we felt on those days in
September?

What if the president hadn't exploited 9/11 so flagrantly for politics
and profit as to strip it of its deserved reverence?

What if, instead of a man who actually grins and smirks when
discussing Iraq casualties, we had a president with the intellectual
and oratory chops to make any of these "what ifs" a reality, because
President Bush surely does not.

A better man usually aspires to positivity in the face of tragedy and
brutality, but in the final analysis history will show that President
Bush barely even tried.

It's a hell of a lot easier and feels so much better to appeal to the
reactionary aspects of human nature: the lizard brain fight or flight
instincts we all have. It's easy, then, for American leaders to pursue
and exact revenge, especially when our nation is the sole military
superpower. "The people who knocked down these buildings will hear all
of us soon," isn't the modern equivalent of "four score and seven
years ago" or "a date which will live in infamy." It was a ham-fisted
applause line. It was an easy statement of vengeance. And it was his
finest moment. Later, in an address at ground zero, the president
recycled the Gettysburg Address which not only served to devalue the
impact of Lincoln's words, but also exposed the president as
unoriginal and, in context of others like Lincoln, made the president
seem small and inadequate.

Can you remember a single complete line from the president's 9/20/01
joint session address? I can't. Thinking back to those weeks, I
remember a litany of bumper sticker slogans better suited for tourist
traps than the Oval Office. Slogans like "smoke the evildoers out of
their holes" and "we will not be cowed" and "watch this putt" are
amongst the first to come to mind. Not quite the caliber of sentiments
expected of a world leader whose every word, as the elected
representative of his people, should have rightfully reflected the
posterity of those who died on that day.

Thousands of men and women were killed in an attack which stemmed from
American foreign policy blowback, and the most comforting lines
President Bush could deliver amounted to a syllabus of roadside
billboards and dialogue from bad video games. I recall waiting for his
next line to be, "All your base are belong to us." He came close to
that Zero Wing line with, "Either you are with us, or you are with the
terrorists." There it is. There's the line. I remember now. His most
memorable line from the 9/20 address was an ultimatum to people like
Saddam Hussein and, I believe, most of the Democrats and the news
media. Subsequently, both the traditional media and the Democrats
alike caved on the Patriot Act and every lie perpetrated in the
lead-up and early execution of the Iraq War.

Iraq itself certainly carries more than enough weight to make
President Bush one of the worst presidents ever. But despite its
nonexistent connection to 9/11, Iraq was, in the mind of the
president, an opportunistic reaction to 9/11. Iraq was the "Pearl
Harbor type event" heralding an Iraq invasion the PNAC neocons
fantasized about in the 1990s. So you can't cite Iraq without forever
coupling it with 9/11 as the latest and most deadly result of "hearing
from all of us."

The myth of President Bush as somehow a "hero" of 9/11 needs to end.
If we can, for just a moment, look through the smoke, rubble and death
and evaluate our chief executive's reactions to 9/11, it's easy to see
a man who wasn't meant to be president during this era -- a man who
most definitely was not designed for his time.

If we set aside the benefit of the doubt the president received after
9/11, it's easy to recall a series of decisions that guided us deeper
into darkness and death, rather than into the enlightenment of a new
era in world history. Instead of compassion, inspiration and humility,
we can easily recall indulgence, dangerous pride and indignity;
sloganeering and exploitation in lieu of positive words and deeds --
words and deeds which so many of his predecessors have managed to
summon under similar duress.

The feeble, laughable President Bush who has emerged in recent years
is the President Bush that would've existed throughout his first term
had 9/11 never happened. Were it not for the undeserved support he
received after 9/11 -- support which didn't reflect upon him, but
rather on the patriotic instincts of America to rally around the
president (any president) -- he would've surely lost his re-election
bid and been relegated to the ranks of our most ineffectual
presidents.

When you couple this basic incompetence with the awful track record of
his post-9/11 history, it's not hard to rank him amongst our worst
presidents. Far better presidents have been doomed to single terms,
simply because they didn't have a major national crisis to falsely
inflate their importance. But you'd be hard pressed to find any
president who handled a national crisis in a similarly haphazard,
destructive way. And there-in, lay the Iraq War.