Actions Speak Louder Than Words

I have a belief than unless you have been in a certain, or similar situation, you really have no idea of what you would do differently than someone else in that situation. That's why I have a tendency to disregard what people say they would have done if....

That being said, I also believe that their actions speak louder than words. John Kerry says that if he had been in Sarasota on September 11th, he would have reacted this way:

"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,"

On the July 8th Larry King Show, he says this:

"...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..."

Red State gives this timeline: "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.'"

He is critical of President Bush for reading to school children for seven minutes, but he couldn't think for forty minutes. Now, I realize there is a difference in being the President and being "only" a Senator. I discussed this before. For those seven minutes, no one knew that we were being attacked. Information was being gathered. Then, the president had some information with which to go before the cameras. In the meantime, a senior senator, several senators as a matter of fact, were sitting, watching, and doing nothing. Because "nobody could think."

He says "we watched the second plane come into the building." These people had the "luxury" of knowing then, that this was a deliberate attack. When President Bush was told about the first attack, no one knew it was anything other than a tragic accident, or maybe a skyjacking gone wrong and was a one plane situation. No one would have dreamed it was anything else until the second plane hit the other tower.

From my own experience: we got a TV into admin very shortly after the first plane hit and turned it on in time to see the second plane hit. I thought at first that it was a replay of the first hit until I realized it was at a different angle and I was seeing smoke coming from the first tower. This was in a matter of seconds. But, it took several minutes and replays to sink in that there were two planes involved. I remember not wanting to think, not that I couldn't, I didn't want to. If I thought about it, I could come to only one conclusion: America was under attack. I'm not the President, I'm not a Senator. I didn't have to think about it.

If Mr. Kerry wants to play the "If I had been..." game, I'll play. If I had been in his position, after the second plane hit, I would have been on the phone to my office, telling my staff to find out what was going on. I would have been on the phone to the National Security Advisor trying to find out what was going on. I would have been asking questions of the Defense Department wanting to know if Washington was in danger (it was).

Now that being said, I wasn't and have never been in a situation like this, so I don't know what I would have done. Mr. Kerry wasn't in the same situation as the President, but he was in a position to get information. And didn't, because, by his own words, "couldn't think" for forty minutes. And apparently only started to think when he was told to evacuate the Capitol building.

On the other hand, maybe he, Barbara Boxer, Tom Daschle, and Harry Reid all joined hands and talked about it.