Unthinkable

From Blogs for Bush:

What John Kerry Says... And What He Actually Did

John Kerry today:

"Had I been reading to children and had my top aide whispered in my ear, 'America is under attack,' I would have told those kids very politely and nicely that the president of the United States had something that he needed to attend to -- and I would have attended to it,"

John Kerry in July on the September 11th attacks:

"...And as I came in [to a meeting in Sen. Daschle's office], Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid were standing there, and we watched the second plane come in to the building. And we shortly thereafter sat down at the table and then we just realized nobody could think, and then boom, right behind us, we saw the cloud of explosion at the Pentagon..."

HAT TIP: Red State, which notes: "the second plane hit the World Trade Center at 9:03 a.m., and the plane hit the Pentagon at 9:43 a.m. By Kerry's own words, he and his fellow senators sat there for forty minutes, realizing 'nobody could think.'"

Hmm. When the unthinkable happens, sometimes you have to just stop and think about it. According to the New York Times's watch, the President was told at 9:05. According to Michael Moore (among other sources), he sat and thought about it for about seven minutes. The junior Senator from Massachusetts, a trained military man, sat without thinking for forty minutes until an attack he could see prompted him to evacuate.

Heck, no, I don't blame him. I didn't realize the full importance of the event myself. In that space between the first plane and the second, nobody thought (or at least nobody said publicly) that it was an attack. Obviously K. still hadn't really grasped that it might be. But then, he was not the person who might have to order someone to shoot down a civilian airliner, only the person who would second-guess him two years later.

You know, that's the thing about sneak attacks, is that you don't know they're coming. And the thing about living in a world with 24-hour news channels is: Eventually, if you're a public figure and anyone cares where you were when It Happened, they'll find out. Odds are good there was a camera on you at the time.

That's why I feel for the President. He had his Moment on camera, in a room full of school children. K. had the luxury of having his out of sight, in Senator Daschle's office.