STERLING, Va. – President Bush had not been informed of the new audiotape of Osama bin Laden issuing a new threat of attack against the United States on Thursday morning until after he finished a 74-minute public appearance here to tout successes in the economy – a theater-in-the-round-like event in which Bush parried and joked with his audience in the freewheeling manner of a seasoned television talk-show host.
"The president was informed about the audiotape shortly after his remarks in Sterling, Virginia, earlier this morning,'' White House spokesman Scott McClellan said later in Washington. "The intelligence community is continuing to analyze the tape to determine its authenticity and if there is any actionable intelligence. If there is any actionable intelligence, we will act on it.''
That could help explain Bush's ebullience and the playful spirit in which he fielded questions from a friendly audience on the floor of a warehouse at JK Moving and Storage. Anyone holding a BlackBerry would have learned just a minute before that event that Al Jazeerah was airing the tape of bin Laden's threat. The email alert from ABC News arrived at 10:15 am EST. Bush started speaking at 10:16 am.
An unbelievable bit of liberal media bias from journalist Mark Silva.
The President wasn't holding a BlackBerry, he was preparing to give a speech. And it wasn't like an attack was being launched, it was just a tape recorded threat. Something to be taken seriously, for sure, but hardly something to pull the President away from an event over. The jihadists rouninely make these threats against America, yet for some reason certain factions seem to believe that our President should retreat to the situation room every time one is made.
Given that many of these same people routinely accuse the Bush administration of trying to keep the American people scared of terror threats for political reasons one wonders how the President should react in order to satisfy them. If he runs to a bunker with a group of strategic advisors every time we get a threat they'll accuse him of trying to "play up" the terror threat. Yet if his response to a threat is reserved (like having his staff refrain from interrupting a public event over a mere threat) he gets accused of not taking terrorism seriously enough.
If you ask me a lot of this confusing rhetoric has its roots in the fact that the left is weak on national security, and they know it. The President is strong on this issue, so the left feels they have to assail him on it. That their invective comes off as little more than confusing blather and conspiracy theories just proves yet again that they just don't get it when it comes to national security.