Kerry said he would have reacted much more quickly than President Bush did on Sept. 11, 2001, when he learned of terrorist attacks. The president spent seven minutes reading to Florida elementary school children after learning that hijacked planes had been flown into the World Trade Center in New York. �Had I been reading to children and had my top aide whisper in my ear that America is under attack, I would have told those kids very nicely and politely that the president of the United States has something that he needs to attend to,� Kerry said.
So let’s review, this. 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 loud of explosion at the Pentagon…”
Nice catch, Red State, who noted “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.’”
“… We have always known this could happen. We’ve warned about it. We’ve talked about it. I regret to say, as — I served on the Intelligence Committee up until last year. I can remember after the bombings of the embassies, after TWA 800, we went through this flurry of activity, talking about it, but not really doing hard work of responding.”
But it is also critical that all of us remember, as we talk about responses, and war against terrorism, that our rhetoric be matched by our actions. If indeed there is a war against terrorism, I remind my colleagues that in a war the first shots are never the last, the first strike is never the worst.What happened yesterday was terrible and horrendous, but we must prepare ourselves and steel ourselves for the possibility of worse until we achieve our goal. And to do that we have to be more prepared than we are today, and we have to take the fight wherever we need to, and in ways that we are, frankly, not yet prepared.
