Published on Sunday, July 4, 2004 by the Long island, NY Newsday
What a Film Has Taught the Bush Team
by Les Payne
'In wake of the president idling in "Fahrenheit 9/11," the White House image-makers have guarded against a recurrence.'When word of the second terror-jet smashing into the World Trade Center was whispered into the ear of the U.S. President of the targeted superpower, the Commander-in-Chief maintained his seat and schedule for seven blissfully uninterrupted minutes - seven minutes!
The matter commanding the president's slavish attention? Listening to third graders while awaiting his turn to read at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla.
After chief of staff Andrew Card whispered the tragic news, President George W. Bush was as compliant as the unknowing third graders around him. He fidgeted in his seat. He grimaced. He beaded and unbeaded his eyes. He wiggled his razor lips. At one point he seemed on the verge of raising his hand and pleading for a toilet break.
Still-camera snatches of this fateful seven minutes have made the rounds. But Michael Moore brings this theater of the absorbed to the big screen in full-color video, complete with biting analysis, in "Fahrenheit 9/11." Moore concludes that Bush idled his engine during this critical period because there was no one - no Dick Cheney, no Colin Powell, no Papa Bush - to coach him off the runway.
Moore's observations aside, the footage is a devastating ad for a superpower stuck now with what appears to all the world as a cipher in the White House. This, incidentally, is no put-down of the American people. The people cannot be blamed for this particular Bush floating to the top because they did not in their popular masses exactly vote him into office.
Nonetheless, here was the Great Helmsman of the Republic at a moment most dramatic. The worst foreign attack on U.S. soil since independence caught the president twiddling his thumbs for seven full minutes as the Twin Towers burned.
Imagine Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the dawn of World War II. Word of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor did not spin him into a seven-minute séance. No cameras were present, but it is a sure bet FDR would not have awaited his turn to read to third graders.
No self-respecting police officer or fireman would continue with the mundane of his schedule when such a catastrophe intrudes unannounced from the sky. But they are trained for the moment, you say. What, then, about accountants, bankers, donut-bakers, and second-story men, to say nothing of those wired for high jinks such as nurses, plumbers, newspaper editors and dentists. It is hard to contemplate the seven-minute Bush lapse for any responsible leader not under the influence, say, of a prescribed substance.
A crisis moment is the spot quiz that defines true leadership.
Failing the moment, as Bush did in Florida that day, suggests a clear lack of the necessities, at least for great leadership. There is no reason, of course, to expect otherwise. His life, as Moore points out in the film, has been a study in nose-diving his entrusted vessel, whether oil drilling firm or baseball team, straight into the drink. Such stewardship was not shaped at academy or tested on the battlefield, but picked up running political campaigns while imbibing to excess perhaps every alcoholic beverage known to mankind.
This is not to give drunks a bad name, for many a great leader has battled with the bottle or other narcotics, reformed, and carried on. Bush claims to have reformed from alcoholism with self-cure doses of right-wing evangelicalism. Though Bush is exaggerated in Moore's political video-pamphlet, the Chief Executive of Crawford, Texas, has emerged as a strutting peacock with an unbridled sense of entitlement whose finger is within easy reach of the nuclear trigger. The world must hold its breath against a relapse.
In wake of the president idling in "Fahrenheit 9/11," the White House image-makers have guarded against a recurrence running up to the elections. At the NATO summit in Istanbul last week, Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair acted out a nicely scripted piece of drama noting the U.S. "handover" of power to Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
"Mr. President, Iraq is sovereign," read a Condoleezza Rice note handed to Bush, seated next to Blair at the summit. "Letter was passed from Bremer at 10:26 a.m. Iraq time." The National Security Adviser had signed the handwritten note, "Condi."
Bush scribbled on the note, "Let Freedom Reign!" The scripted Bush then turned to Blair, and this time he did the whispering. The two leaders shook hands. Though White House spokesmen have denied seeing "Fahrenheit 9/11," there was every indication at the summit that the handlers had clearly learned from it.
No idling here. The note was immediately passed along to the media. If, however, the president intended to shadow the "let freedom ring" line of "My Country 'Tis of Thee," he ironically flubbed it by writing "reign."
Perhaps he should have spent a few more minutes with those Florida third graders.
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