Now we know why our Maximum Leader won’t testify under oath, privately or publicly, It’s because he might be asked about what he said was his immediate reaction on It’s hard to believe, but it sounds typical of him: the callous frat-boy’s smirking Also as reported by the Journal, he couldn’t have seen what he said he saw at that moment, Also as reported by the Journal, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett now Also as reported by the Journal, when our fearless Leader was flying around the country in What an embarrassment it would be, if our fearless Maximum Leader had to fess up to all this Meantime, the Journal’s editorial page, ran Actually, we have a better idea. If the commission really wanted to serve the country, it Now we know why our Maximum Leader won’t testify under oath, privately or publicly, before the 9\/11 Commission, as others are doing. It’s not because he wants the executive branch of the federal government to maintain a “separation of powers” between it and a 10-member panel partly appointed by the Congress. It’s because he wouldn’t know the truth if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-598","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-9E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nbefore the 9\/11 Commission, as
\nothers are<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> doing. It’s not
\nbecause he wants the executive branch of the federal government to maintain a “separation
\nof powers” between it and a 10-member panel partly appointed by the Congress. It’s
\nbecause he wouldn’t know the truth if it walked up to him and said “Howdy.”<\/P>
\n
\nthe morning of 9\/11 (when he was in a Florida grade school to promote his education
\nbill). Did he really say what he recalled saying? As he saw an airliner fly into the
\nWorld Trade Center tower, our Maximum Leader said: “Well, there’s one terrible
\npilot.”<\/P>
\n
\nreaction, a remark so crude it testifies not just to his insenstivity but to his
\nflat-out stupidity. As reported yesterday by Wall Street Journal reporter Scot J.
\nPaltrow in a lead, front-page article (which is not online, unfortunately), here’s the
\ncomplete picture:<\/P>
\nAt [a] Dec. 4, 2001, town-hall meeting in Orlando, Fla., Mr. Bush said, “I was
\nsitting outside the classroom, waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower — the TV was
\nobviously on. And I used to fly myself, and I said, ‘Well, there’s one terrible pilot.'” Several weeks
\nlater, he said essentially the same thing at another public event in Ontario,
\nCalif.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\nbecause the classroom TV where he was waiting “wasn’t even plugged in, according to [the
\nschool] principal.” In fact, the president’s recollection is “just mistaken,” his spokesman now says.
\nProbably just as mistaken as his claim that he was the one who put the military on high alert,
\nfollowing the attacks when, in fact, it was four-star Air Force Gen. Richard Myers who “raced
\nback” to the Pentagon’s command center and — “with smoke spreading into the cavernous
\nroom” from the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon — “ordered the officer in charge …
\nto raise the military’s alert status to Defcon III, the highest state of readiness since the 1973
\nArab-Israeli war.”<\/P>
\n
\nsays our fearless Leader was merely providing “a description that the public could understand,”
\nwhen he claimed he’d given the order, and was speaking in “broad strokes.” Tellingly, neither
\nGen. Myers nor the Pentagon would comment. Not incidentally, Bartlett is the White House point
\nman attacking the credibility of Richard Clarke, the top anti-terrorism expert who worked for our
\nLeader and has just published a devastating insider’s account of both his personal lack of
\nleadership in the war on terror and his administration’s prosecution of it.<\/P>
\n
\nAir Force One on 9\/11, first to Louisiana and then to Nebraska, instead of returning to
\nWashington, it was on a fool’s mission because a rumored threat against the president’s
\nplane was false. But our fearless Assistant Maximum Leader Dick Cheney’s office is still
\nclaiming “it couldn’t rule out that a threat to Air Force One actually had been made.” Which
\nsounds just like Cheney’s familiar mantra about still not being able to rule
\nout finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Even Bartlett now admits “there
\nhadn’t been any actual threat” to Air Force One and that “word of a threat had resulted from
\nconfusion in the White House bunker.”<\/P>
\n
\nunder oath.<\/P>
\n
\nstaff in a lengthy editorial. It didn’t argue that the confusion about that day, the gaps in
\nwhat we know, and whether the attacks could have been prevented, be cleared up as soon as
\npossible, or at least by the official deadline of July 26. Instead, the lead editorial yesterday
\nurged the 9\/11 Commission to stall. If its members “really wanted to make a public
\ncontribution,” it said, “they would shut down and resume their probe after the elections.”<\/P>
\n
\nwould go on a duck-hunting trip with Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia before
\nissuing its conclusions. That would surely guarantee an unbiased report.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"